Three customers, who are studying Graphic Design at UWE (University of the West of England), used the pub as a university project transforming a billboard into a poster that showed some of the few negative reviews received by the pub in a “tongue-in-cheek” marketing.
The novel way of marketing the micropub, which opened in 2015 on Gloucester Road and normally receives good customer feedback, has used comments such as “Normally excellent – but not last night” and “Friendly staff; most of the time.”
Laugh
Hickey, who focuses on serving cask ale from independent local producers and discourages TV and mobile phones instead, encouraging conversation in the venue, said he thought the idea was a “bit of a bit of a laugh.”
“We get a few negative views which are a mixture of half-truths and complete nonsense,” he said.
“When they first told me about their billboard idea, I was very sceptical. I thought these big posters were for promoting fast food chains and high fashion retailers; not printing bad reviews for a backstreet micropub.”
The reaction to the billboard has been very positive with new customers coming into the pub in order to see if the reviews are true.
“Customers now love it and are now having their photo taken with the billboard,” he said.
Negative reviews
“We even had a new customer come in who had been walking past the pub for the last six years. The kind of people who go to the trouble of reading reviews are interested to go in and find out it’s true.”
He said that the marketing initiative would not have worked if the pub was getting lots of negative reviews.
“I think it’s been a great idea. Obviously, you’ve got to be someone who’s got mostly positive reviews before you can make fun of your bad reviews,” he said.
On TripAdvisor, the pub has a 4.7 out of 5 with the majority rating the pub as excellent and has a 4.8 on Google. It is also planning to launch beer mats in the pub in the future.