Mitchells & Butlers

Background

For 125 years, Mitchells & Butlers has aimed to be the venue of choice for a relaxed, memorable meal or drink, whatever the occasion. This vision extends across its diverse portfolio of subsidiary brands – yet each one has its own unique brand identity, market positioning, and target audience.

Inevitably, this requires a lot of marketing firepower, and an efficient internal operation to manage marketing content effectively and promote each brand in its best light. Lucie Parfitt, Process & Resource Coordinator at Mitchells & Butlers, shares the story of why she and her team implemented an integrated Bynder x Wrike solution to meet these needs and reveals the benefits it has brought company-wide.

The challenge

Before bringing on Bynder, Mitchells & Butlers managed its assets across Sharepoint and Dropbox, yet as their marketing demands grew (particularly after COVID), they quickly outgrew storage limits and the lack of centralization meant the team spent a lot of time searching for files.

Mitchells & Butlers also works closely with third-party vendors to produce marketing materials, and this raised its own set of challenges. Sharepoint functioned like an intranet, which made it difficult to give access to third parties, and collaborating/briefing on projects was laboriously tracked via excel sheets and across email. Communication was often missed, stakeholders weren’t being notified as projects progressed, and the lack of version control on assets made it difficult to see who was updating what (and when). A new way of working was needed.

The need

Mitchells & Butlers saw the value of a highly integrated digital ecosystem that could automate much of the manual admin and create efficiencies across their content lifecycle – from briefing campaigns to centralizing assets. In other words, combining project management and digital asset management to streamline their entire content operations.

The project management tool needed to:

• Centralize all marketing campaign activities for the whole business
• Provide easy access to collaborate with key third-party vendors
• Offer asset version control and efficient approval processes

The digital asset management platform needed to:

• Centralize all marketing assets with a custom-made taxonomy for fast findability
• Be accessible for third parties to upload and access marketing materials
• Comply with strict IT security standards and safeguard confidentiality

A digital asset management platform (Bynder) integrated with a project management solution (Wrike) was the perfect fit.

Solution

By integrating Bynder and Wrike together, Mitchells & Butlers are now benefitting from a streamlined content lifecycle that provides the ‘missing link’ between content creation and distribution.

Bynder centralizes the digital assets of all 16 brands, tagged with custom metadata to ensure instant findability. Assets are fed to and from Wrike to fuel brand campaigns, ensuring marketers and agencies know exactly which assets are in progress, need approval, or ready to be published. Everyone automatically knows a project’s roles, responsibilities, and deadlines – as well as having the company’s digital library at their fingertips.

The result? Mitchells & Butlers are now 66% faster in executing marketing campaigns – from briefing right through to publishing.

What’s next for Mitchells & Butlers?

More teams at Mitchells & Butlers are now looking to adopt the Bynder x Wrike solution for themselves after seeing its success. There are plans to expand its use for the brand’s hotel chain, Innkeeper’s Collection.

Other integrations are being considered to facilitate a more agile way of working – particularly Bynder’s integration with social media management platform, Sprout Social.

Soon, Mitchells & Butlers will also be expanding its Bynder suite to include the Brand Guidelines module, providing a digital home for its brand identity (and all 16 of its subsidiaries).