Mark Daniels: My Andy Warhol moment
If I had a pound for every time I'd managed to get either myself or the pub mentioned in one form of the media or other in the past twelve months, I'd be quite a happy little chappy.
Press releases, blogs, pertinacious comments against news articles, letters to the editors of local newspapers - they've all been used to great effect, not least one statement I published in response to a local columnist that successfully had my pub busy for the week following its publication.
But none have been more amusing than the giant snowball that seemed to happen this week following a tongue-in-cheek comment I made against a news article on this very website. On Friday, as the news of J.D. Wetherspoon's 99p pint broke, I posted a mischievous little comment to the effect that it is now cheaper for me to go and buy my barrels from the JDW chain than it is to buy from my brewer.
On Saturday, that comment was quoted in the business pages of The Times, citing me as angry, and by the end of the weekend the BBC had been on the telephone to ask if they could come and interview me for the 6:30pm broadcast of Look East on Monday night.
Never one to turn down the opportunity for a bit of free publicity, I agreed. There was even the possibility that they might have done an outside broadcast from the pub, live. In the end, however, the crew turned up and interviewed me for ten minutes on my thoughts regarding Wetherspoon's recent promotion and then showed my double chin on the telly for about thirty seconds.
It does seem to me, however, that there's a lot of furore happening around the Wetherspoon's promotion, and that's understandable. After all, it's basically ripped up the rule book and gone and joined in with Tesco et al by selling beer at prices the rest of us simply cannot afford to achieve.
I have to say that as a piece of marketing goes, it is a work of utter genius. After all, as Brendan Behan once said, there is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. And Wetherspoon's hasn't signed its death warrant with this one. You have to admire those guys for issuing a press release at the start of the New Year saying they were going to sell Greene King IPA for 99p - press releases are free marketing that we should all make use of and the release last week has had the media in a hubbub all weekend. Stories have run in local presses nationwide, the national press itself, radio, television, the web, blogs, Twitter statuses ... by the end of the weekend almost everybody in the land knew about the promotion, and boy were the locals in my pub giving me jip for selling my IPA at £2.60. Its pubs are busy and it got all of that promotion free of charge, which basically means they don't have to spend any money on marketing this month and can instead put that budget back on the bottom line to support the low cost of the product.
The J.D. Wetherspoon's management must be sitting in their board room with great cheesy grins on their faces.
Unfortunately, however, they might as well have gone round the rest of the trade and slapped us all in the faces with a bunch of wet kippers. For some time now we have been defending ourselves against the accusations that pubs encourage binge drinking, fighting to have something done about the cheap booze sold by supermarkets and, at a time when the Government are trying to curb drinks promotions and ban happy hours, they're basically sticking two fingers up at Westminster.
Rather than work with the trade to help improve its image amongst Daily Mail readers, however, Wetherspoon's has simply used its massive buying power and marketing budgets to break rank with the pubs and join the supermarkets, making it virtually impossible for anybody else to compete.
As a village publican, I'm not overly bothered - I'm not in direct competition with a Wetherspoon's and therefore, theoretically, its promotion doesn't really affect me. But other pubs are in competition with it and you try explaining to customers why we can't sell IPA for the same price. My stock answer is that I can't sell it to them at 1989 prices because E.ON provides me with electricity at 2009 prices...
Understandably, Greene King has spoken out against Wetherspoon's decision to drop the price - after all, it's making a mockery of what is effectively its flagship brand and devaluing the status the brewer has put on its main product, not to mention the ramifications the 99p pint will have on the rest of its pubs, all struggling to make a profit on the product at modern-day pub prices.
Justin Adams of Greene King went so far as to state that the brewer is not supporting the price promotion run by Wetherspoon's. This may be true, but if I sold IPA at 99p a pint I'd make a loss; I'm willing to bet Wetherspoon's won't...
