Middletons Steakhouse & Grill

Middletons Steakhouse & Grill engaged Mystery as part of a branding exercise to both create consistency and a more compelling brand both for their existing restaurants and to make it easier for the company to roll out more restaurants in the near future.

Due to very quick growth, Middletons' marketing collateral had run away with itself and wasn’t providing a cohesive and clear identity for the brand. The company gave Mystery the brief to tie it all together and develop the identity, menus and brand new website as a focal point to give the business a powerful brand identity both on and offline.

Middeltons brand positioning and identity design

In order to define Middletons brand personality, we undertook a brand workshop with the key stakeholders and decision makers to define the company and what it stood for, focusing on what makes Middletons special.  This also enabled us to help define the company’s brand messaging in terms of positioning statements, how they presented themselves and how they wanted to be perceived.

Once we had defined their ‘brand character’ through our unique Mystery Mandala, we were able to evolve the brand identity to better represent the business and align it more coherently with the customer experience.

Middletons Menu Design

The brand definition and new identity was applied to the menu design, together with our own extensive industry expertise and insights to support the operational values of brand, centred on the customer, to improve ease of navigation. We also developed a new suite of fonts to support the tonal values of a more premium casual proposition.

Middletons core values of professionalism and passion were highlighted by making the customer aware of the restaurant’s in-house central butchery, a compelling difference that had not been spoken about previously and that supported their dedication to top quality ingredients at affordable prices.

Overall the re-alignment of the brand highlighted the quality of the product they were serving to their customers. This engaged and informed the customer, increasing the perception of cost versus quality and as a result improving the experience and so, indirectly, to drive sales.

As well as identity and menus, all other communications and marketing collateral, including A-Boards, was also evolved accordingly to present a consistent brand experience across all of the customer’s engagement points.

Website redesign

The original site was lacking personality or any real visual impact to reflect the quality of the brand and food at its restaurants. Its structure and navigation did not lend itself to positive user experience; had minimal SEO impact and was not responsive for mobile platforms, which can account for over 60% of traffic in this sector.

Mystery ran a workshop with the client to discuss the client’s needs, such as increased online visibility, efficient booking system and easy for the team to update. We also educated the team on SEO best practices (URL structure, keyword targeting and social media) to ensure they had all the knowledge they needed to continue to develop the site.

A new website design was created that was simple to navigate, included clear booking and mailing list call to actions and had strong visual impact, using mouth-watering photography as the key motivator to drive bookings and footfall.

The mobile-ready website now truly communicates the personality of the Middletons brand and highlights the quality of the food and customer experience.

Using Google Analytics we can see that since the website relaunch, hits to the Middletons site have doubled. Bookings have also increased as a direct result of website traffic, as well as walk-in trade.  The company has now opened another site.