Barracuda Group appoints Cocktail Marketing

Cocktail Marketing, the loyalty partnership marketing agency, has been appointed by the Barracuda Group to create loyalty brand partnerships across its three leading bar brands.

Barracuda runs more than 220 bars and Cocktail will create loyalty partnerships with synergetic brands for the three leading Barracuda Bar brands and their respective loyalty cards, these include: Varsity bars: the V Card, Barracuda bars: the B Card; Smith and Jones bars: the SandJ card.

Myles Doran, Head of Marketing of Barracuda, said: "Cocktail have proved that they can deliver big brand partners for the 07/08 V Card and we have great confidence in stretching their brief further across all our great brands.

"Loyalty partnerships with strong brands strengthen our loyalty card offering and lead directly to an increase in footfall and sales".

Since being formed in July 2000, the award-winning Barracuda Group has become the fastest growing national managed pub company in the UK.

It operates pubs and bars across England, Wales and Scotland under four principal trading formats: Smith and Jones, Varsity, Barracuda Bar and Juniper.

Founded by a management team led by Chief Executive Mark McQuater, Barracuda Group's rapid growth, emphasis on quality and significant future expansion plans have helped it to become one of the top 10 largest managed pub companies in the country.

Cocktail has created ten brand affinity partnerships for Varsity's V Card, the highly successful student loyalty scheme with over 500,000 members, in order to increase sales of the VCard while raising brand awareness and driving sales of the VCard promotional partners.

Partnerships have been created with synergetic lifestyle brands in order to target a key audience of 18-25 year old students.

These include: Play.com, Dominos Pizza, Essensuals Hair, Figleaves.com, Fitness First, Firebox.com, STA Travel, National Express, 7Digital.com, MrsCashback.com.

In return for exclusive offers and marketing support, partners will receive extensive exposure through a variety of communication outlets, including branding on 750,000 VCards valid from 1 September, 2007 until 31 August 2008.

Existing partners include LOVEFiLM, STA Travel, ASOS.com and Phones 4u.

Other exposure will include extensive branding in all of the 35 (soon to be over 40) Varsity bars across the UK including A boards, posters, leaflets and menus in the main bar area and washrooms.

Plus partner branding on Varsity's homepage with a dedicated landing page for each partner offer and presence on the Varsity E-newsletters and SMS texts.

Additionally partners will have the opportunity to receive advertising space on the bar's plasma screens, branding on staff uniforms, communication through themed evenings, product sampling, plus branded VCard vehicles, satchels, flyers, stickers and door hangers for guerrilla marketing activity.

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