After decades of poor ridership and a lot of bad publicity, British Rail underwent a process of managerial change in the mid-late 1960s. By 1970, British Rail had undergone an enormous process of modernisation. As part of this modernisation, British Rail hired a number of different organisations from the private sector to handle its communications.
They recognised that one consumer that had been left out of railway advertising was the “housewife”. Many ads before had featured housewives, but they were not targeted at housewife’s, instead south africa rcs data featuring them as token additions. of this campaign, a number of research studies were conducted to ascertain the best ways of reaching the traditional conception of the housewife, including a number of focus groups, panel interviews and questionnaires. In 1972, as part of research into three promotional advertisements designed to “assist in the creative development” of promotional leaflets for the optional travel market, Ogilvy Benson and Mather published a recommendation that there were two interesting avenues for British Rail to take.
One gap was for the “Woman on her Own in London”, which noted a market of housewives who would accompany their husband on business trips and were “usually left on her own while he attends his conference, etc.” The advertisement described how the husband ‘had to be brave’ about his wife’s spending habits. What it revealed was a clear separation from masculine ‘work’ and feminine ‘shopping’, and worse still a separation between the ‘productive’ economy and the ‘consumptive’ economy.