Sarah Mitchell

Sarah Mitchell leads marketing at Decker and works on the question the platform exists to answer: what a screen should actually show. Her areas of responsibility include promotion strategy for restaurant and retail brands, digital menu structure, campaign planning across locations, and the editorial direction of the materials published here.

Her work concerns the content layer rather than the platform. A menu board listing forty items sells nothing in particular. A promotion running at the wrong hour reaches the wrong customer. A campaign approved centrally and ignored locally shows up as a gap in the numbers rather than as a complaint.

She works with operators on menu board design — hierarchy, item placement, dayparting, and the sequencing of promotions across a network — the decisions that determine whether a screen changes customer behaviour or simply displays information. She also decides what goes into the template library, based on what operators repeatedly build from scratch.

In expert content she covers digital menu strategy, promotion planning for multi-location brands, store-level campaigns in retail and grocery, guest-facing content in hotels, seasonal and daypart scheduling, and how screen content connects to sales.

Sarah studied marketing and communications. Her academic background included consumer behaviour, brand management, campaign planning, and marketing analytics. She also developed additional expertise in content strategy, visual merchandising for physical retail, and performance measurement for in-store media.

This background is why she treats a screen as a placement rather than a surface. It has a defined audience, a position in the customer journey, and an effect that can be measured against sales of the items it promotes.

It also shapes how she reads a menu board: as a hierarchy where the first three items carry most of the decision, not as a list that has to be complete.

Sarah’s experience covers marketing for restaurant and retail brands, campaign planning across multiple locations, and content production for in-venue media — menu boards, promo screens in supermarket aisles, lobby and event-floor displays in hotels, and shared-area screens in malls. That work includes menu presentation, promotional calendars, and the practical problem of holding a brand standard across sites that operate independently day to day.

At Decker she connects that experience to the product: which approval workflow a franchise group actually needs between head office and a venue, how a promotion has to be composed to be read from four metres away in a queue, and which content changes are worth automating against a data source rather than scheduling by hand. The promotion scheduling that Patty Boys runs across its ordering area came out of that work.

Editorial role

Sarah directs Decker’s editorial content and reviews materials about menu design, promotion strategy, campaign planning, and the commercial side of screen networks. She is the expert reviewer for anything addressing what belongs on a screen and why.

Her review checks that a recommendation holds in a venue: that the layout is readable at the distance customers stand, and that the campaign described can be run by the people who will run it.