The Victorian-based hospitality group, formerly known as CLG, has been rebranded to Morris Hospitality.
Owned by parent company Morris Group, a rebrand of CLG has been in the works for a couple of years, having been a priority for CEO Tim Fitzgerald since joining the hospitality business. The rebrand to Morris Hospitality is not only a nod to the parent company, but also part of a new marketing philosophy.
“We’ve never been consumer facing as CLG – it’s never really been a brand that we’ve gone out to market with. And that wasn’t necessarily due to the name itself, it was more just the fact that it just didn’t fit with anything that we kind of resonated with as a group,” explained Morris Hospitality senior marketing manager Grace Dorman.
“And since we have become more of a Victorian-focused pub group, it made sense to then come up with a name that fit within the wider context of our company to go to market with, and essentially unify all those properties.”
One of the aims of Morris Hospitality’s rebranding is to alert patrons of each of the pubs to the other venues in the portfolio.
“We’re really clear on who we are and what we do really well across a lot of venues. And that’s being people-focused and service focused, and obviously, product focused. That lends itself to wanting to help our target audiences across the various venues be able to connect our venues to each other,” stated Dorman.
“To understand that when you come to one of our venues, you can also get equally an equally great experience at another one of our venues and kind of helping people understand where they all sit in the context of one another.”
The new Morris Hospitality branding uses a similar logo to the Morris Group, but rather than a purple colour way, uses reds and oranges, to evoke the warmth and vibrancy of hospitality. A new website and a lot of consumer-facing video content has been created to launch the Morris Hospitality brand into the market. Activation and an internal marketing campaign will also launch in April as well.
Morris Hospitality Group is made up of six venues within Victoria, including The Albert Park Hotel, Portsea Hotel and Half Moon. Outside of Victoria, it also owns and operates the Julatten Hotel in Far North Queensland, which it reopened in mid-2023.
Morris Hospitality is also partnering with Moda on an $85m waterfront Isle of Wight hotel development on Phillip Island, Victoria. The development includes a new seven-storey mixed-use hotel with 163 rooms, and a three-storey tourist/worker hostel, and four food and beverage outlets, including a reimagining of popular Isle of Wight pub, bistro, hotel dining and flagship restaurant, as well as a yoga studio, gym and wellness centre, and two function rooms.