{"id":300993,"date":"2025-07-29T10:50:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T10:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/300993\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T10:50:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T10:50:15","slug":"bristol-pub-sees-customer-surge-after-tongue-in-cheek-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/300993\/","title":{"rendered":"Bristol pub sees customer surge after tongue-in-cheek campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">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 \u201ctongue-in-cheek\u201d marketing. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">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 \u201cNormally excellent &#8211; but not last night\u201d and \u201cFriendly staff; most of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Laugh<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">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 \u201cbit of a bit of a laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">\u201cWe get a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.morningadvertiser.co.uk\/Article\/2024\/09\/04\/Operator-shares-opinions-on-reviews-for-first-time-sites\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.morningadvertiser.co.uk\/Article\/2024\/09\/04\/Operator-shares-opinions-on-reviews-for-first-time-sites\/\">few negative views<\/a> which are a mixture of half-truths and complete nonsense,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">\u201cWhen 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.\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">\u201cCustomers now love it and are now having their photo taken with the billboard,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<p>Negative reviews<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">\u201cWe 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\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">He said that the marketing initiative would not have worked if the pub was getting lots of negative reviews. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">\u201cI think it\u2019s been a great idea. Obviously, you\u2019ve got to be someone who\u2019s got mostly positive reviews before you can make fun of your bad reviews,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-article-body-skinny\">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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three customers, who are studying Graphic Design at UWE (University of the West of England), used the pub&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8818],"tags":[381,748,393,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-300993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bristol","8":"tag-bristol","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114936140752636289","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}