Billy Buchanan: selling the pub experience

I was sitting watching Andrea Bocelli in concert last week when I was taken aback to hear the chap next to me say to his companion that, if he closed his eyes, it was just like listening to the CD in his living room.

He seemed to feel that this was a good thing. For me, £90 lighter for the ticket, I would have been horrified if the experience was the same as sitting at home in my living room. I was looking for added value for my money and a richer and more fulfilling experience.

Bocelli did not disappoint me and I have to say that if this is what the guy who was sat next to me gets in his own living room then he should be the one selling the tickets.

It started me thinking about the business we are in and what it is that drives people's decisions on whether to make the effort to go out and drink in a pub or whether to sit at home and drink their carry out.

There are all the usual negative reasons for not going out — such as price, the smoking ban, and encouragement from off-trade advertising to enjoy your favourite tipple at home. These things certainly drive people away from pubs, but what I see as lacking in our space is the reverse — a positive encouragement from the industry, whether the pubcos or the brewers, to bring people back to pubs.

The trade press is always very supportive, but anyone reading the trade press is probably already involved in the trade. What we seem to lack is any momentum or initiative to advertise and promote more widely the virtue of the pub experience as against the alternative of sitting at home.

I see this not as brand-led imperative for a product, pubco or pub chain, but more about promoting the virtues of actually enjoying your local, whatever form it might take — be it a young person's venue, a gastropub, your community local, or a high-street venue.

Why was it that, in the past, we had hordes of people drinking in pubs and enjoying themselves? What were the key virtues of being in a pub? The obvious ones spring to mind, such as comradeship, great beer, friendly staff and, more recently, excellent and affordable food.

We should be gathering our collective wits and pooling our collective marketing and promotions budgets to address this dilemma.

At the moment, the trade is consumed by factional debate, with various factions on the tie, various factions on the rent debate, machine share debate and a whole host of other issues. We bat these arguments back and forth and spend huge amounts of time and resources on them, when what we should be doing is working together on the one common goal of getting people to understand that drinking a good quality drink in a pub with your friends, family or on your own to soak up the atmosphere is what socially responsible drinking is all about.

Why does it seem to be beyond us as a group to put some weight behind generic promotion and marketing of these key factors to get people to return to the pub? I am not naïve enough to think that this collective effort will stem the decline completely or that every closed pub in the UK will suddenly reopen its doors to a flood of people.

But I am suggesting this to encourage some dialogue between the people who can make a difference and to encourage a unified approach to resolving what I see as one of the bigger problems we all face.

How do we get people's social interaction and drinking habits to move back towards including the local or high-street pub more regularly and enjoying the products and the atmosphere, rather than only nipping out for one or getting pre-loaded before the evening begins and spending as little as possible in the pub?

We can all extol the virtues of the various high street and village offerings, but it seems to me that the time to be in competition is once we have built the overall demand.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the best thing for the industry is for the bickering to continue. But if we look at what has primarily changed the pub model and created a number of these problems, it is lessening demand.

When I was at university, I do not remember the text books saying that if demand falls the best way to resolve the issue is to blame everyone else. They talk about finding solutions — and that is what we need to do as an industry.

Billy Buchanan is chief executive of the London Town pub company