I’ll firstly caveat what comes next (which at best will be controversial, and at worst potentially career ending, but it needs to be said, so I’m going there anyway), by acknowledging that hospitality has taken a proper battering. Navigating societal change, economic uncertainty and the ongoing government attack – everything from weight loss jabs to war, has been undeniably hard. However, while no one is helping us as a sector, we’ve done little to help ourselves. 

For such a people-facing industry, we seem to have forgotten the people, and I know this, because of the way we market to them. If marketing in its simplest form, asks us to take goods and services and present them in a way most interesting to the market we seek to engage with, we have failed. 

And if our idea of “our market” is some sort of lazy generic profiling such as “Generation Z” (which is literally just every single person in the UK aged 13-28), we’re honestly never going to get any better. If you can find a way of positioning your brand to appeal to every single 13-28 year old in the country, you are a better marketer than I (and probably every marketer that ever existed, frankly).

So why am I telling you this? Because the sector finds itself once again in crisis, and it’s time to lean heavily on our customer bases -– but sadly, we have done nothing to guarantee that support. 

Let me explain. Imagine a friend, well more of an acquaintance really given their behaviour. A person who talks only about themselves (Their new car! Their holiday! Their perfect children!). You know the kind. 

The kind who never asks how you are, doesn’t know what is going on in your life, knows little about you really, sends you a bottle of champagne on your birthday (you don’t drink). The kind who disappears for weeks or months at a time, then pops up only to ask if you can take the kids to football practice. Or worse, has you in some sort of WhatsApp group, where you are the lucky recipient of a running commentary on their life – the unreliable, uninterested in you kind. 

So imagine this “friend” calls you at 5am one morning, in a panic, asking for a lift to the airport. You might do it once, under duress, because you are a good person, and they’ve offered to pay for the petrol. But you won’t do such a favour a second time. You reflect on your relationship so far, and don’t feel remotely compelled to put yourself out again. I mean, why should you?

Well you (or your brand anyway) is that friend. 

You’ve talked way more than you’ve listened. You’ve delivered a self-serving monologue, rather than participated in a mutually beneficial dialogue. And you haven’t noticed that people put you on “mental mute” a long time ago. 

So given the trading conditions, you have work to do on building a meaningful relationship with the people on your base. (And if you don’t see the point, please ask someone who does understand how it works because the success or failure of your business might depend on it). 

Assuming you’re all ears, what do you need to do to next?

1. Identify the people in your base who have provided the most value, and protect them first. These are the people you must not lose. Somehow they’ve stayed with you against the odds. 

2. Work out who is already lost. Trying to engage these people right now will kill your margin, let them go gracefully. You can maybe try to rebuild at a later date. 

3. Find the people in your base whose behaviour suggests you might just win them round, if you talk to them in a more considered and relevant way. This is your opportunity, don’t waste it. 

4. Ask questions. Get to know the likes, dislikes and preferences – and ideally the motivations behind those behaviours. 

5. Act on what you find. Make your future communications relevant and timely. You’re aiming to build a digital dialogue rather than continue your monologue. It takes effort and planning, but it must be done. 

And if you’re shaking your head, thinking what kind of marketing rubbish is this, let me appeal to your more commercial side, because the results are business changing. 

1. More engaged customers who will keep you firmly in their reduced repertoire when times get tougher

2. Higher margin revenue driven by your CRM – real “friends” don’t need to be bribed with offers to turn up

3. Predictable and dependable revenue in the form of increased frequency and spend

Our customers are savvier than ever before. And if you don’t get to know your customers in intimate detail, then react to that insight in the form of relevant, meaningful communications, you will lose yours to brands who do. 

It’s time to put your customers first – and reap the rewards. 

There’s a pub on the windswept shores of the beautiful Hebridean island of Eriskay called Am Politician. You don’t need to be fluent in Gaelic to know this translates as The Politician, and you might wonder which politician it was who deserved to be honoured in such a way.

 

When you go there, as I did last year, it turns out that it’s named after the SS Politician, the cargo ship that ran aground in these waters in 1941, washing up the 28,000 cases of Scotch on board, which were eagerly rescued by the locals. The incident inspired the book, and then the film, Whisky Galore!

 

And Am Politician serves as a small museum of the story – as well as doing all the other things a good pub should do. So, it’s got nothing to do with politicians, really, and why would any pub after being continually let down by those in office?

 

I’ve just had a press release from the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) reporting a survey that shows around nine in ten MPs take a “favourable view” of the hospitality sector. The BBPA considers this encouraging, at a time when the trade is getting nervous about what the November Budget might have in store for the industry.

 

But I’m afraid it doesn’t mean very much. Everyone loves hospitality (apart from one in ten MPs, it seems), and politicians especially love pubs. Or, rather, they are very keen to be seen to be loving pubs. That’s why there are so many photos of them in the news holding a pint, or even pulling a pint, in some constituency local they’d never noticed before.

 

Press secretaries know this will shine a favourable light on a politician because the media love pubs, too. Well, most of the time, anyway.

 

It’s been noticeable of late that national newspapers have been taking a positive interest in pubs. For instance, there’s Will Hawkes’ 500 Best Pubs in England project for The Telegraph, Pete Brown’s series on beer and pubs in The Sunday Times, and even little old me has been getting stuff into the Daily Mirror and The i Paper.

 

This is great, especially for a working journalist, but also for promoting trade, you would hope – encouraging people to get off their settees to explore the great variety of wonderful pubs we have out there.

 

Perhaps it will do a bit to keep a positive view of pubs in minds of policymakers too, but in terms of getting a more complex message across, it’s limited.

 

The examples above are all lists of “the best”, cut in different ways. The mainstream press demands bite-sized unequivocal pieces of information like this because it’s easy to read, and it invites interaction, especially disagreement (a reminder that the word “list” also means to precariously lean to one side).

 

Because everyone’s an expert when it comes to pubs, and we journalists know we’ll never keep them all happy. It’s a cross we bear lightly. A heavier problem comes when the government announces a consultation on licensing reform. 

 

Yep, that was a right old mess. A detailed and reasonable review of certain licensing processes was reduced, or rather inflated, to headlines about pubs and bars staying open longer. That was followed by a predictable backlash from sections of public health, fearing “chaos”, and a less predictable outcry from pub and bar operators, rightly angry that giving them longer hours wasn’t going to address their issues at all.

 

Except that everyone had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Or the wrong stick. Hopefully that’s been clarified now. But we may have lost the chance to seriously consider and debate the proposed reforms, which do raise questions around how much local control we need, away from the noise of uninformed nonsense. 

 

The problem was that the government, in dire need of good stories to tell, wanted to loudly let everyone know how it was helping the hospitality industry. Yet what it was suggesting, while well-meaning and potentially making life a little easier for some operators, was largely dull and incomprehensible and not headline material. The media clutched at a straw it thought its readers might understand and ran with it.

 

It might have been better if the discussions had continued quietly between civil servants (who do usually know what they’re talking about), local authorities and the trade without the democratic sham of asking the opinion of all and sundry. But that’s politicians for you: obsessed with “optics” – and I don’t mean the ones dispensing whisky. 

Many pubs claim to be the smallest in the country, and among those at the more petite end of the market are The Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, The Signal Box Inn in Cleethorpes and The Butchers in Herne. Although the latter might be slightly too big to be the smallest at three metres by four metres, there is no disputing that it was the UK’s very first micro-pub.

 

When Martin Hillier opened his tiny bar almost 20 years ago in a former butcher’s shop, he created a concept that has inspired an army of would-be pub operators to open their own micro-pubs. Armed with the new Licensing Act of 2003, it became significantly easier to successfully gain approval for change-of-use and an alcohol licence on former retail units. 

 

According to some sources such as the Pubs Galore website, there are around 1,000 micro-pubs, although the collation of the list is tough because many outlets do not necessarily define themselves as micro-pubs and might not easily be identified online. There is no doubt that after a very slow start after The Butchers’ opening, the number of applications for new micro-pubs has continued to accelerate, and right now there is a constant flow of approvals from local councils for new ones across the whole country.

 

These openings very much go against the overall trend we continue to see in the licensing premises market. Between March 2020 and June 2025, more than 4,500 outlets closed – including 2,370 community pubs, 1,350 gastro-pubs and 400 bar/restaurants – whereas the only positive category was bars, with 80 openings, according to AlixPartners’ Hospitality Market Index. Maybe micro-pubs fit into this latter category. 

 

Whichever way they are counted, there is certainly much to be pleased about in this burgeoning corner of the hospitality industry that highlights how the smallest of units with operating costs stripped to the bone can be commercially viable, even in the midst of a terrifyingly challenging market. 

 

However, it is not the only bright spot, because while micro-pubs have proved that small is beautiful, the large managed pub companies have over the years showed that the largest pubs can also operate profitably. The two groups from opposite ends of the size spectrum highlight how increasingly polarised the pub sector has become. 

 

With thanks to Lavender Bank Partners and Geof Collyer for providing the following statistics. In 1994, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) operated 2,635 managed pubs, with £364,000 sales each and Ebitda of £88,000 per pub. In 2024, it had a much fewer 1,654 pubs, but they achieved sales of £1.6m each and Ebitda of £241,000. There is no doubt that the average size of the M&B pub has increased over this period in order to deliver these numbers.

 

See also the figures from JD Wetherspoon over recent years. In 2015, the group hit its peak count of 939 pubs, with each generating sales of £1.6m and Ebitda of £190,000, But then the company begin skewing its portfolio to larger units (and selling off the smaller outlets), and by 2024, its pub numbers had reduced to 813. However, each outlet brought in a much larger £2.5m in revenue and Ebitda had increased to £300,000.

 

The reality is that the country has been sadly losing many of its traditional mid-sized Victorian pubs, which have proved to be unviable in many locations, because they either are often simply too big for their local communities or insufficiently big to benefit from economies of scale that enables cheaper prices and kitchens/chefs to operate. Their position in the perennially squeezed middle has put them in the danger zone for decades, and this scenario has not changed in recent times.

 

But amid the doom and gloom, we do at least have operators at the two ends of the market who have found models that are very effective at countering changing hospitality and economic landscapes. This does not necessarily translate into profits galore for all of them, but it does at least present a positive story to tell in these tough times. It seems to be a tale of go big or small or go home.