The Bar started life as a recipe website. Traffic was low and the content rarely updated or changed. The brief was to evolve thebar.com to become a trusted brand for drink recipe content, product and more, helping Diageo achieve their commercial goals of connecting branded content to commerce. The target audience were predominantly Gen Z and Millennials, plus mums and amateur mixologists. We were also talking to people who liked hosting at home – they wanted to bring a group of friends together and were focusing on the details. We also had to include the gift buyers, people who like to splurge on experiences, people seeking to level up their drinks game and those who wanted to make their social occasions more vibrant and memorable.

The logo is inspired by the physical location of The Bar retail location in Soho, London. The area was sold to a local brewer in in 1536 and we took our cues to create a modern mark in the form of 
a revival typeface that references 15th and 16th Century letterforms. The bold connecting dash references the physical slab of the bar and creates a sense of harmony and balance by splitting the logo into three key parts.

The shapes and stickers represent cocktail ingredients and decorations, our colour palette has a natural sense of seasonality, with the lighter tones reflecting the brighter and warmer months, and the darker tones nod toward cosier evenings and festivities.

As a global brand, our photography is adopted across all markets, adopted and localised for different occasions. The principles that acted as a backdrop to our approach communicate ‘real life’ situations and ‘perfect imperfection’.

From a pilot in the UK, to live in 10 markets: GB, USA, India, Brazil, Kenya, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Panama, Australia.

The aggregated results following the new brand being in market for 6 months were:

— Conversion jumped by 200%

— Average orders increased by 40%

— Website sessions grew by 77%

— Revenue rocketed by 864%