Pete Brown: When is a pub not a pub? When it's a licensed catering outlet...
It caused a titter a few months ago during a conference call with the City when John Lovering, new chairman of Mitchell & Butlers (M&B) corrected an analyst who kept referring to M&B's pubs as pubs. "You keep talking about pubs - I want you to talk about licensed catering outlets," ordered the chairman.
It would be nice if we could dismiss this as an isolated piece of small-minded, deluded, corporate bovine waste, but sadly it seems to highlight a broader trend.
Check out Whitbread's website and you'll see that, like M&B, it's a pubco which doesn't have any pubs. Pubs like Beefeater and Brewers' Fayre are restaurants apparently. Not 'pub restaurants' - just plain restaurants, owned by "the UK's leading hospitality company" which admits no links whatsoever to a legendary brewery and pub owner of the same name that dominated our industry for over two centuries.
Small groups and independent operators are at it too - I've started to get an 'ampersand twitch' whenever I pass an establishment which I could have sworn was a pub, but is on closer inspection a 'bar & kitchen' or even a 'kitchen & eating rooms', laborious constructions clearly intended to say "we're way posher than a smelly old pub" but instead suggest to me that the establishment in question is talking out of its 'sphincter & cheeks'.
Why are pub operators ashamed of the business they're in? Part of it reflects the move towards food as the main source of revenue - wanting to create a distinction with the wet-led pub on one side and blur the boundaries with restaurants on the other.
Another part of it is the neediness of the social inadequate that finds voice in our 'aspirational' society where we all have to pretend to be something better than we are, part of the same GBH on the language that has given us an economy full of 'consultants' offering 'solutions'.
I could argue from a sentimental, pub-loving position why this campaign to erase pubs is a Bad Thing. But these corporate types never listen to that kind of wailing. So instead, as someone with almost 20 years' experience in marketing strategy, I'll explain why it's a short-sighted, deluded, poorly thought-out betrayal of the establishments it seeks to promote, in purely business terms.
For the past 60 years, marketing thought has taught us to put the consumer at the heart of business thinking. With so much choice, you can only attract consumers if you demonstrate that you're responsive to their needs. And I've never met a single consumer - sorry, person - who has said: "Tell you what, let's pop down the licensed catering outlet."
Pubs - even food-led pubs - are different from bars and restaurants. That's what we like about them. Foreign tourists come from all over the world to drink (and eat) in British pubs - survey after survey shows it's one of the first things they want to do when they get here. As a domestic population, we recognise that we're a bit straight-laced and uptight, and pubs are informal places where we can relax. When we relax, we spend more money! Sometimes we will choose to go to restaurants. But we like eating in pubs more.
Our affection for the pub is collective and universal. Look at media coverage: when the story is about drinking, or licensing hours, the media is almost always against our industry. Talk about beer or brewing - they couldn't care less. But talk about pub closures, and suddenly everyone is "Well, we can't have that… the plight of the pub… what can be done to save it?"
To put these points into language that corporate drones can comprehend, to deny pubs their pubbiness is to actively erode the competitive advantage your licensed catering outlets enjoy over all the other licensed catering outlets, everywhere else in the world. I don't care if you have a Michelin star. If it looks like a pub, feels like a pub, and has regulars who think of it as a pub, it's a pub. And no-one benefits from pretending it isn't.
