The work
    Case study

    Social

    Social asked us what its next decade should look like. We went through its first decade and read it back to its leadership before anyone wrote a strategy.

    Client
    Social, the café-bar chain from Impresario
    Our role
    A ten-year brand retrospective
    When
    2026
    Led by
    Fatema Hanif
    Two drawn hands reach towards Social’s bracket-and-hash mark on an orange ground
    The opening slide of our presentation to Social’s leadership.

    The brief

    Social opened in 2014 with the idea that work, coffee, dinner and a gig could all happen at one address. Ten years on it runs more than 50 outlets in 10 cities, and its leadership asked us what the next ten years should look like.

    We asked to go backwards first. A brand that size has many versions of its own past. The founder remembers the intent, marketing remembers the campaigns, operations remembers what broke and how it was fixed. Each of them remembers a different decade, which makes it hard to agree on what comes next.

    What we did

    1. Read everything, in order

      Brand documents written by different people in different years, campaign decks, menus across cities and eras, and research that had been presented once and shelved. We put all of it in sequence.

    2. Asked every year the same questions

      We used David Aaker’s brand identity model, which looks at a brand as a product, an organisation, a person and a symbol, and added a fifth view of our own: the brand as a guest experiences it. When two eras answer the same question differently, the difference has a date on it and can be discussed as a fact.

    3. Listened

      Customer surveys, leadership workshops and sessions with outlet teams, to measure the distance between what the brand believed about itself and what people experienced.

    4. Set it against the world outside

      A second timeline ran alongside the brand’s own: what was happening in cafés, bars and the culture around them over the same ten years.

    5. Told it back

      We presented the decade to leadership as a story in four eras. They also received a year-by-year map of the brand, a measure of how consistent it had been across those years, and two options for what to do next.

    A grid of variations on Social’s bracket-and-hash mark, each holding a different symbol
    From the deck: Social’s mark, drawn many ways.
    An old television screen showing the words Social 2.0
    From the deck: the title card for what comes next.

    What came of it

    Social now has its first decade as one continuous account, in a form its whole leadership can read and argue from. It shows which founding instincts survived every era, and which habits arrived along the way without anyone choosing them.

    Two things the research showed

    91%
    of the audience was mainstream, for a brand built for the counter-culture
    5%
    of visits were for coworking, which had once been the centre of the idea

    Both figures come from the research in the retrospective. The rest of what we found belongs to Social.

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