Marketing & Promotions: Consumer insight

The 1950s New York executives commonly credited with giving birth to modern marketing and advertising techniques would never have believed it: cutting-edge marketing is taking place in a specialist facility in a Cardiff pub's basement.

The Grape and Olive houses Wales's only dedicated market research suite, a set-up designed for observing group discussions undetected by the respondents from behind a one-way pane of glass. Brains, owners of managed site the Grape and Olive, uses the suite for researching its own consumers and for tenant feedback, and it is also hired out to other clients.

Consumer groups are gathered by specialist recruiters from external agencies. They are invited to a session in the suite (lured by the offer of being fed and watered, naturally), where a facilitator fires questions at them on a specific subject. Microphones feed the sound through to the observers, and the proceedings can be recorded.

When Brains was converting the former Whitbread site, explains head of marketing Stuart Dobson, it made sense to install the suite. He says: "We had been working with a marketing company who said 'it's a shame there's not a dedicated resource for customer research in Wales'.

"So when the Grape and Olive came up as an acquisition, we thought - with all the function space there - a market research suite could be a good income stream. It's a high profile thing for Brains to do, too."

A market research suite may be an unusual thing to find in a pub, but Stuart adds: "It's a natural fit for a pub because the subjects on one side of the glass and the clients who are frequently there on the other side need entertaining and high-quality food and drink. That hospitality element is what we, as a pub company, do. If anything, it's a surprise there has not been one of these in a pub before."

According to Stuart, the pub has been getting two or three external bookings a month for the facility, at a cost of £600 for a four-hour session.

It's a solid income stream for a pub, and a resource that would be valuable to any pubco that wants to understand its market. "This is a measure of how seriously Brains takes its marketing," says Stuart. "It's the old adage that any business which talks to its customers does better."