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Brewing the Perfect Blend: A 500-Person Coffee Taste Test Across London and New York
How a London Restaurant Group Uncovered the Brand Perception Gap That Shaped Its UK Expansion
Europe
Case Studies
The Challenge
Two concepts. One brand. No clarity on what guests saw when they walked through the door.
A celebrated London restaurant group had built something rare — a flagship dining concept with genuine cultural cachet, and a second, more intimate bar concept with its own emerging personality. Both were thriving in London. Both had loyal followings. And the group was now planning to expand into several new UK cities.
But the data couldn't answer the questions that mattered most. How do guests perceive these two experiences — as extensions of the same brand, or as distinct destinations? When someone chooses the bar over the restaurant on a Friday night, what's driving that decision? And critically: would the brand equity built in London travel to cities where neither concept had a presence?
These weren't questions for a survey. They needed to hear it directly from the people sitting at the tables and standing at the bars — in the moment, while the experience was still fresh.
Our Approach
We didn't want polished opinions. We wanted honest reactions from people who'd just had the experience.
MindMarket designed a customer intercept programme across two London locations — one for each concept. We conducted 100 structured conversations with guests immediately after their visit: short, focused exchanges capturing how they chose the venue, what they associated with the brand, what drove their experience, and whether they'd visit if a location opened near them outside London.
Each conversation lasted eight to ten minutes. Long enough to get past surface impressions. Short enough that people were still in the moment — still feeling whatever the experience had made them feel, before it got smoothed into a generalised memory.
Our moderators weren't clipboard-holders running through a script. They were experienced hospitality researchers who understood the dynamics of talking to someone who's just had a great evening out — how to open a conversation without it feeling like an interruption, how to probe on brand perception without leading, and how to capture the emotional and social dimensions of venue choice that structured surveys miss entirely.
We ran the programme with daily reporting and real-time quality control. If a pattern started emerging after the first thirty conversations, we could flag it immediately — giving the client early signal while fieldwork was still live.
The Insight
The two concepts weren't competing. They were having entirely different conversations with their guests.
Guests at the flagship restaurant described the experience in social and cultural terms — it was a place to bring people, to share something, to feel part of a story. The emotional connection was warm, communal, and strongly tied to the brand's public identity.
The bar concept told a different story. Guests there described something more personal — discovery, intimacy, a sense of being in on something. They weren't choosing it as a substitute for the restaurant. They were choosing it because it offered something the restaurant didn't: a feeling of independence from the larger brand.
This was the finding that changed the expansion strategy. The group had been thinking about the bar as a smaller extension of the flagship — a supporting act that would ride on the main brand's recognition. The research showed the opposite: the bar concept had its own emerging identity that guests valued precisely because it felt distinct. Leaning too heavily on the flagship brand in new cities risked undermining the very thing that made the bar concept work.
The intercepts also revealed that brand awareness outside London was thinner than expected for the bar — but thick with warmth for the flagship. This asymmetry had direct implications for which concept to lead with in new markets, how to sequence openings, and how much independent brand-building the bar would need.
The Impact
A hundred conversations. A fundamentally different expansion playbook.
The group entered the research expecting confirmation that their flagship brand would carry both concepts into new cities. They left with a more nuanced strategy — one that respected the distinct identities guests had organically built around each experience.
The findings directly shaped decisions about market entry sequencing, concept positioning in new cities, and how the two brands would relate to each other outside London. Marketing and communications plans were revised to give the bar concept more independent positioning rather than anchoring it to the flagship name.
Perhaps most importantly, the research gave the leadership team a shared language for a tension they'd been feeling but hadn't been able to articulate: the bar wasn't a smaller version of the restaurant. It was a different proposition entirely. And that difference was its biggest asset.
"We thought we were expanding one brand into new cities. The research showed us we were expanding two — and that changed everything about how we planned it." Mary L., Head of Marketing.
Planning a Hospitality Research Project?
If you're expanding, repositioning, or trying to understand how your guests experience your brand across locations or concepts — we can help. Learn more about our hospitality market research:
Questions About This Study
What are customer intercepts, and why use them instead of online surveys?
Customer intercepts are structured conversations conducted with guests immediately after their experience — in or near the venue itself. Unlike online surveys, which rely on recalled impressions days or weeks later, intercepts capture reactions while they're fresh and unfiltered. Guests haven't yet rationalised their experience or forgotten the details that matter. For hospitality research, this immediacy is critical: it reveals the emotional and social drivers behind venue choice that post-hoc surveys consistently miss. Our moderators are trained to conduct these conversations naturally, without disrupting the guest experience.
How do you ensure the research captures genuine guest perceptions rather than polite feedback?
Two things make the difference. First, we conduct conversations immediately after the experience — guests are still in the moment, not performing for a researcher. Second, our moderators are trained in hospitality-specific research techniques: they know how to create space for honest responses, how to probe beyond surface-level satisfaction, and how to read the signals that tell you someone is being polite rather than truthful. We also use real-time quality control, reviewing transcripts daily to ensure the depth and candour of responses stay consistent throughout fieldwork.
Can this kind of research be conducted across multiple cities or countries?
Yes. While this study focused on two London locations, the intercept methodology scales effectively across cities and markets. We regularly coordinate multi-location hospitality research programmes — from guest intercepts across different UK cities to multi-country studies spanning Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. Each location is staffed with local moderators who understand the cultural context, and the entire programme is managed through a single point of contact so you get consistent quality and comparable insights across every site.
Learn more about how we approach hospitality research across global markets.
