Market Research: Opening a Public House in Wallingford.

Authors Avatar

Emma Stevenson        AWI        Market Research

Market Research: Opening a Public House in Wallingford

Traditionally, a public house is a building licensed to sell alcohol to the general public. This traditional image has dramatically changed since licensed pubs were first opened. More common now are pubs/restaurants where the customer can buy meals as well as drinks. Pubs also have televisions with SKY satellite systems to attract crowds when big games are played, as well as pool tables, jukeboxes, dart boards and fruit machines. I will be looking at whether opening a pub in the Wallingford area would be beneficial, if it would need any of these extra attractions or if people prefer more traditional pubs. I will try and find out what Wallingford doesn’t have, so I could have a unique selling point for my pub.

The problem I face is finding out if there is a gap in the market for a pub in Wallingford area and if so where it should be, what features it should have and how it should be run.  For the style and running of the pub, I will look at gaining a competitive edge over the local competition. To decide on a location I will look at accessibility, the site and the competition. For running the business I will use questionnaires to try and gage the market trends in order to use these to my full advantage.

SECONDARY DATA

As I live just outside of Wallingford, I already have some knowledge of the local pubs, so know the general style of pubs and what they offer. Using Multimap.com, I found a map of Wallingford and have marked where the pubs are. I included Crowmarsh in this because it’s so close to Wallingford. I will try and use this map to find possible locations for a new pub.

As you can see above, there are already ten pubs in Wallingford, which is a lot of competition unless I find an area of entertainment that they don’t cover. The two pubs in Crowmarsh are predominantly restaurants:

The Bell was recently taken over by “The Hungry Horse” chain. It does fast cooked English foods – the quality isn’t high but it’s cheap and easy, so popular for food.

The Queens Head was recently taken over by “Thai Orchid”. It is expensive but is well worth the money, the people there are very friendly and give you free prawn crackers when they start to recognise you – this is a fantastic way to encourage loyalty. Both pubs used to be traditional old English pubs, serving home cooked foods.

Join now!

The Boathouse, across the river, is probably one of the most successful pubs in Wallingford – appealing to young and old during the day to serve food by the river, and young people in the evenings for drinking. At weekends they have DJs and Drum n Bass nights, which are very popular.

The Dolphin has karaoke nights that attract young and old, and the rest of the pubs don’t do anything special regularly.

The George is a hotel rather than just a pub, but it still proves popular with older people, as do The Kings Head, The Coach ...

This is a preview of the whole essay