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The Perfect Pub Experience

The Perfect Pub Experience

Written by
James Picken
Published

March 31, 2023

Category
Music

How can Startle help make your pub experience even better?

Visiting the pub is a tradition for many of us. Whether it be for the delicious food and drink, an after work get-together, or a reunion for family and friends, it’s a place for us to come together.

But creating a great pub experience can be difficult. It’s something customers tell their friends about - it can elevate your brand to distinction, with the atmosphere of all your sites harmonising in unison. Ultimately, as a landlord, it can improve your bottom line.

At Startle, we work with some awesome pub brands, and we’re always looking to help create the perfect all-round experience for customers. Here’s some of the ways we do that. 

Music

Music is powerful, but using it with intention takes skill. That’s why we blend artificial intelligence and actual intelligence to curate playlists that influence the way your customers spend. Because, while tech, data and science are important, there’s nothing better at picking music for humans than humans. Especially our humans.

We know that pub managers have a million and one things to do at any given moment. That’s why we make our services easy to set up, schedule, and our support is around 24/7/365. 

Take Amber Taverns, with over 150 pubs across the UK. When they came to us, they were in a sticky situation with numerous music providers. This made it hard to organise and have consistency across their pubs, and they wanted to consolidate the service, at a great price.  

We provided them with a default music profile, tailor-made by Startle, covering mornings, afternoons, evenings and weekends. Warm, positive and familiar, each playlist is specifically designed for cosy pub environments.

Ultimate DJ 

Imagine igniting the electrifying power of a live DJ event at your pub, anytime you desire. 

Enter: Ultimate DJ. A game-changing revolution that unites the unparalleled expertise of Club & Radio DJs, Editors and Producers. All for a fraction of the cost of a local DJ. 

Watch the evening come alive as each tune impeccably flows into the next, creating a seamless and immersive experience designed to keep the energy soaring until closing time.

With Ultimate DJ, venues can subscribe to our service and play fresh, non-stop sets any night of the week. Discover the perfect mood with a variety of styles, including Ultimate Party, Totally 2000s, Fresh Hits, Pure Dance and many more. 

When the crowd in your pub demands a party, give them a night to remember.

One of our Ultimate DJ customers is Greene King, the country’s leading pub retailer and brewer. The brand use the service for later evenings and weekends, bringing their venues to life. It’s not only changed the game for their entertainment, but it’s also saved them money in a time where we’re all watching our pennies. 

Rock and Roll Bingo

Get your pub singing from the rafters with a new, digital twist on bingo.

Rock and Roll Bingo is a self-working music bingo game packed with the most toe-tappin’, bum wigglin’ sing-alongs, specifically designed for pubs to give their customers a stellar night of entertainment.

Not only is it a much-loved game across the country, but it's host-free, played on punters' own devices around a table, and incredibly easy to just plug-in-and-go with the pre-recorded host running the game for you!

And that’s not all - Startle Rock and Roll Bingo customers also get access to Brain Box Bingo, a bingo inspired quiz game with a mixture of general knowledge and themed rounds, and Bar Room Bingo, a traditional numbers-based bingo game. Pretty cool. 

The Copper Rose in Sunderland agrees: 

"With modern technology having advanced so much, there are less and less people going out of the house to be entertained. Rock and Roll Bingo proves that people still want to come out of the house and meet their friends, family and partners at the pub!"

Startle Arena and Display

Got screens in your pub you feel like you’re not making the most of? We’re here to help. 

Digital signage can be a dynamic way to communicate messages. Startle Display provides an effective entertainment and communication platform - whether you have 5 screens or 5,000 to manage, our digital signage system supports easy uploading and scheduling of static or video content, allowing you to tailor your displays to work perfectly for each time and day of the week. 

Digital signage advertising different flavours of Jack Daniels whiskey
Drinks advert at Amber Taverns

And if you’re a sports fan, here’s one for you. To truly tap into the opportunities live sport provides to pubs and bars, you need a platform to broadcast, promote and hype up events. Startle Arena was designed to do just that. An add on to our digital signage solution, Startle Arena provides a dynamic schedule of content that will both entertain customers in your venue at the time, and encourage them to return on match days.

Combining recent sports statistics with entertaining content and promotional videos from the main UK and worldwide broadcasters, Startle Arena creates a TV ‘hub’ for all things sport.

Atmosphere

Perhaps the most important element of getting the perfect pub experience is the right atmosphere. Your environment is ever changing. Knowing how this impacts the rest of your business is key to making sure your atmosphere always hits the spot.

Our atmosphere monitoring service brings together data on your pubs’ busyness, energy, temperature and local weather in one place to give you valuable insights into how the environments change over time. And more importantly, how this impacts areas like sales, footfall and other customer behaviours. Our pre-transactional data can help you close the loop on customer journeys and learn what happens in the run up to a purchase.

If you’re in tune with your atmosphere, you can know if you’re under or overstaffed, paying too much for your heating or air conditioning, missing any footfall related opportunities and get a better hold of operating compliance by monitoring noise levels. And, crucially, you can use the data to make automated changes such as changes to music and signage so your staff can focus on what matters most - serving your customers.

Music for shots, for shorts, for shaken and stirred, for lingering longer and ordering something stronger.

We love working with pubs to create the perfect experience for their customers. We’ll help guide you on how to make the most of our products, and we’re here 24/7/365 if you need us. Relentlessly

Heard enough?

Ready to create standout customer experiences? Get in touch to find out how we can use music and tech to help you achieve your goals.

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Music is powerful, but using it with intention takes skill. Chat to our team today to find out how our behavioural-science backed, curated playlists could help you achieve your goals.

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The Perfect Pub Experience

James Picken

With an MA in Music, an MA in Music Psychology, and a Mini MBA in Brand Management… James is one of our Startle geniuses. As Creative Director, it’s his job to produce and execute our music output, making sure everything is sounding, feeling and performing just right for our customers. When he’s not on the clock, James loves to walk the dog, read, lift weights, even dabbling in some music production, and he’s known in the office for his love of Mariah Carey.

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