Historic Royal Palaces
Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) is an independent charity that manages the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace and Hillsborough Castle.
Digby Trout Restaurant Group (DtR) won the contract to operate all catering outlets at Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace in 2004. Air Marketing was employed to consult for DtR, to help build a marketing partnership with HRP and support local managers to market their catering outlets.
Challenge
How to brand and market the catering outlets within each of the unique palaces.
Activation
Renown international branding agency, Wolff Olins had undertaken a major re-branding exercise for HRP. Air Marketing recommended to DtR that it would be more powerful and more successful to align the catering brands to the overall brand HRP brand rather than create an individual catering brand.
It took numerous meetings to persuade HRP that we were capable of interpreting their brand guidelines to best effect within the catering arena. It proved to be an incredible partnership which was headed up by Inga Brydson and the Air team:
Success
A Taste of History. Bringing alive historic food stories found through working with palace curators and Historic Head Chef. Spent year working with chef to recreate a series of historic dishes that could be made and sold in the Palace restaurants.
Introduced The Very Hungry Caterpillar brand into HRP as their children’s branded food offer. A perfect brand as built on HRP story telling concept; was a brand that crossed multi generations and mirrored visitor profile for HRP. Successfully negotiated with Chorion to gain licensing rights to use the brand in the HRP food outlets. Created launch plan which included using UK children’s TV personality to perform book readings at Hampton Court Palace. Created merchandise, marketing materials and PR plan to push out campaign to local media.
Launched the Palaces as venues for weddings
Devised idea to create an orientation map which highlighted all eateries within the palaces with aim to gain longer dwell time on site and additional spends in different outlets during one visit
Re-positioned Afternoon Tea at the Orangery in Kensington Palace with highly sucessful PR campaign with $1M+ of media coverage.
Collaborated with Group Travel to improve uptake of catering with tour groups through improved offers and communication
Created content and offers for new website for all palaces
Devised, created and printed HRP Marketing Copy document for all catering outlets at the palaces. Included historical references, stories,message hierarchy, word menus and strap lines
Participated in multiple cross department meetings between caterer and the charity to ensure that catering remained an important focus of attention and resource. Created fruitful partnerships that had not existed in the past.