Mr. Boston Bartender's Guide
The little red book behind every bar, Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide has been trusted by both professional and avocational bartenders for the better party of a century. See how we brought this iconic brand into the 21st century with branding, marketing and state-of-the-art web experience.
From 1935-2012, the Mr. Boston Bartender's Guide was printed more than 11 million times and holds a place of honor on innumerable bars throughout the world. We were able to take a decades-old brand and give it a richness that honors its tradition. The website allows robust cocktail recipe search and other functionality. Our continued marketing supports a lively social media audience. This project won Judge’s Choice and Gold at the 2017 AAF Awards Show.
With the final printed edition of Mr. Boston in 2012, the brand was in need of a way to carry on its legacy and reach a modern, ever-evolving audience of cocktail enthusiasts. To start, we digitized more than a dozen editions of “the Guide” – dating from the very first edition in 1935 to the last 2012 printed edition. We designed and developed the database to hold the cocktail recipes and created a management system that now houses more than 15,000 cocktail recipes.
Diving into the books, we found them to be rich in illustration, style, and cocktail lore. Those original resources served as a valuable guide in developing the modern brand. Our design, illustration, and photography reflected both the legacy as well as our audiences.
Our next priority was to move Mr. Boston from the page to the screen. Using our branding process, we expanded the brand with illustration and photography and designed an innovative user experience with a lightning-fast search. Using those ingredients, we crafted mrbostondrinks.com: bringing Mr. Boston’s rich history and revamped brand into the 21st century.
In the first 18 months of mrbostondrinks.com, the site has drawn millions of pageviews. With all that data, we find and continue to find, amazing insights about the history and growth of cocktails in the United States.
Through carefully designed assets and informed content, we have curated a captivated audience of professional bartenders and hobbyists alike from around the world. On Mr. Boston’s Instagram account we welcome follower’s questions about ingredient selection, suggestions for substitutions, and admiration for the cocktail’s history. Many have even recreated our cocktails and posted their results on their own profiles.
In just a few months on Instagram we have seen major growth. Since April 2017, traffic to MrBostonDrinks.com has skyrocketed to 5,000 unique users a week, and growing.
As we actively manage Mr. Boston’s social media profiles, we pay close attention to the response of our audience. It’s no surprise that a compelling image is vital to getting attention. To create the perfect images we have a full team that produces content on an ongoing basis, for the website and marketing efforts.
