Creating the Eat Drink Meet brand with Mitchells & Butlers

Mitchells & Butlers owns a wealth of food and beverage brands across the pub and restaurant market. They wanted us to create a stand alone brand for a venue booking app that stands out from the crowd and gets them noticed. The identity supported the launch of a new digital product that empowers customers to search all Mitchells & Butlers facilities based on their unique needs. Mitchells & Butlers identified the need to be able to bring together all of their estate into one place for the purpose of supporting all their brands and their visibility as venues. We embraced the challenge of creating an architecture that brings together a mix of larger brands that are well known and established and softer brands that don't have an outward brand identity.

We created a modular design system that allows Eat Drink Meet to showcase venues not just for food and drink but also for experiences; think restaurants by the seaside, rooftop city bars, countryside classics, event spaces and more.

 This modular brand identity system works across the digital ecosystem; it allows customers to look for the experience they want and the business to showcase their brands, locations and offerings.

In order to build a proposition and gain market validation, we worked with internal stakeholders and conducted external customer research. Who are the products and services for? What experiences are they looking for? What’s missing from competitor experiences that could give us the edge? These were some of the insights that came from research, allowing us to create a better brand story and proposition.

By leveraging the brand story, we created a design language that worked across the entire digital estate; it provided a holistic view of how the identity can work across both print and digital marketing, as well as the flexibility to be refined for digital applications. It also ensured that the language was consistent across the entire experience.

Together with our product design teams, we worked to cross-pollinate insight and research. This helped to evolve thinking about the digital domain that would house the proposition. By working in sync, our product teams could make sure they were adding the right styling to components, plus make sure the copy matched the right voice and tone. They could also highlight any opportunities to explore, in terms of functionality and customer needs.

We created guidelines for colours, logos, placements, typography, CTAs, copywriting guides across digital, and many more applications. 

 We also produced a full brand playbook, which included a guide on the brand story, what it stands for, who it talks to and why it has the character and tone it does, as well as how and where this should be applied. After the narrative about the brand, the playbook moved into clear visual design guidelines, specifying how and where to apply the visual styles.