Book A Bar Ltd is a mobile bar company operating out of Maidstone, Kent. I met with their Director, Byron, in 2021 following a local advertisement for freelance design services. The nature of assistance that Book A Bar required at the time centred around maps for a handful of their event spaces in the July of their upcoming season.
Initial Assessment
On meeting with their team and shadowing their workflow during a week at their head office, I spied a range of assets that had been overlooked:
- A selection of physical media, namely bar runners and menus, had the wrong typefaces that led to a lack of continuity on Book A Bar’s point of sale media; crucial for their customer experience.
- Their existing promotional media had varied styling and it became clear that multiple designers had been employed to create one-off assets that didn’t tally up with their brand’s message.
- Existing digital channels and their core website were outdated and left the customer overwhelmed with false information, this crossing of wires meant that Book A Bar’s sales team had to frequently readjust their customer’s expectations as the pricing their customers had found was incorrect at the time of their initial call.
These issues caused the following difficulties for Book A Bar;
- An impression of incompetence on the customer’s side as the information they discovered from the company’s official channels proved to be unreliable during first contact.
- A level of frustration on the sales team as they would be chasing their tail asking for up-to-date information in-between calls with a potential lead; thus increasing conversion time offering up the opportunity to lose the customer in the interim.
- A lack of cohesion felt by the customer across the Point of Sale and other channels – typefaces and logos being different to what was expected – and sales media existing in random styles made it hard to discern whether the media belonged to the company at first glance.
The result of these issues hampered lead nurturing and called the company’s efficacy into question, a big problem for an independent business that was recovering from a period of inactivity (UK Lockdown) and couldn’t afford to miss opportunities in the already saturated hospitality sector.
Future Brand Strategy
On meeting Book A Bar, their Director had made it clear that brand standards were important to them and the relatively quick expansion of the company had resulted in a necessity to focus more on the operational side than their brand identity. This shift to the physical had worked incredibly well for their sales in the short term but, in a competitive market, the necessity to update and focus on a more encompassing strategy had become apparent. Book A Bar became intrigued into how they could improve their offering and limit damage to their future sales by investing capital into brand identity, and so Byron and I developed the following outline to assist in reigning in the ‘bolted horses’ and get a handle on what needed to change:
Assess which materials were out of date > Listen to the Team’s concerns regarding their daily operations > Look through customer feedback to figure out where to position the branding going forward > Set an order of operations from Top Priority to Lowest Priority
With the above outline in mind, we followed up an analysis of the brand with a clear direction for each segment and began refreshing the relevant media in order to improve the identity as a whole and patch up Book A Bar’s appearance.
Timings of projects were relative to Book A Bar’s ongoing workload during the weekends (with setup for events occurring during the week) and so targets were approached incrementally so as not to disturb this workflow or interfere with the success of their team. The following was achieved over the span of 6 months:
- Remastering the logo materials which had since been split across an internal server and were no longer understood by the team. New iconography was also created at this stage and the core language of the brand established before proceeding.
- Refitting the existing website and making sure all of the media contained therein was relevant, correct and easily accessible to potential customers. Highlighting key products and packages that could be upsold and creating curiosity for the client before their initial contact; phone or email.
- Resetting the brand standard expectations for the immediate Team’s daily touchpoints: email templates that required modernising, letter headers for correspondence, quoting templates for customers, and labels that were used internally as well as on-site for equipment in the public eye.
- Designing any physical media that needed reprinting in accordance with the new brand standards. This included the point of sale on mobile bar units, bar runners, menus and signage.
- Developing new promotional media that separated the core bar types and packages into a colour-based system that was easy to understand for new customers and the Team, highlighting the benefits of each type of service and allowing for simpler comparison during sales.
- Creating sub-identities for hired equipment that was entirely unique to Book A Bar and enabled them to better position these products to distinct audiences.
Conclusion
After the update to their brand identity, Book A Bar reported greater success with in-person meetings when utilising their fresh promotional material and they were more successful with upselling their lesser known services and products. Team morale improved as the contact and communication with lead nurturing had also benefitted from fewer instances of confusion. Customer feedback began to mention how well presented the bar media appeared with a general uptake in positive comments surrounding the customer’s journey and the company’s overall approach. At the time of writing this in July 2025, Book A Bar has remained a client of mine for the past 4 years. Together, we’ve built countless documents, worked on illustrations for bar panels, sign written vehicles and created one-of-a-kind POS display media for individual events. The continued evolution of their brand identity has been so successful in part to the initial groundwork we put in 4 years ago to re-establish their strategy and the diligent manner in which its director, Byron, has championed the company’s brand standards through to today.
If you have a business or individual brand that is suffering from similar issues, namely: mismatched media, customer confusion or a lack of knowledge on how to proceed due to premature scaling then you might be in line for a refresh just like Book A Bar. With years of experience in identity, I make a point of working with you from the ground up, wherever you may be at the time. I ensure that the choices we make are of benefit to your workflow with the least amount of interruption possible.
