Greene King: creating the year's best performing menu

Transform a menu into a competitive brand

With a traditional, value for money proposition, the Flame Grill brand competes with the likes of Ember Inns, Wetherspoons, Chef and Brewer, and Beefeater amongst others. The segment is mainstream and customers enjoy a welcoming dining experience and the USP of tasty and healthy flame-grilled dishes.

The brand was lacking in clarity and consistency. In a busy competitor market, the challenge was communicating the unusual offer of a brand-within-a-brand. The value of the Flame Grill name was recognised but it also needed to sit within an existing pub, i.e. The White Swan, so we needed to differentiate Flame Grill as a clearly defined branded food offer.

A combination of customer focus groups and a workshop with the Greene King senior management team were undertaken to ensure we had a clear understanding of the customer before defining the offer and developing the brief.

A menu concept with defined and flexible creative

We concluded that Flame Grill (FG) is a menu concept rather than a brand. Instead of creating a logo which might clash with the pub branding and create confusion, we created of a suite of elements that could be used to identify the food offer and sit harmoniously within a range of different pub settings.

An eclectic mix of fonts is used to create layers of type and deliver messages in a way that’s fun and distinctive. These ‘type stacks’ are one of the key FG identifiers and they are easily adapted to include offer focused statements from the warm, welcoming language that we developed to convey a home-from-home environment.

A broad colour palette and a branding-iron styled stamp complete the suite of graphic elements and provide a flexible identity that evolves with each new season’s requirements. Menus feature the new creative and a simpler, easy-to-read layout allows customers to quickly find what they are looking for.

A 9% increase in sales and more…

This Flame Grill menu outperformed all the other Greene King pub brands. The new layout contributed to a 9% increase in sales of the lucrative two-for-one meal deals and more significantly, they experienced a cover growth of 4.5%.