Why It Works: Why the Famous Five did a jolly clever job for GWR

Published in Marketing Week, May 2025.

Behavioural science does a good job of explaining why utilising The Famous Five paid off so handsomely for Great Western Railway.

Did you know that Great Western Railway (GWR) was fondly known as ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’ in the 1900s? That might be hard to believe when you consider the average UK rail experience in 2025 feels far from divine.

In 2017, though, rail journeys were plummeting, and GWR set out to recapture some of the earlier heady excitement of train travel. As part of a massive rebrand, they decided to switch their marketing strategy dramatically, away from a focus on the rational reasons for rail, and towards the emotional.

Enter The Famous Five. Enid Blyton’s beloved storybook characters were the ideal way to rekindle the sense of adventure historically associated with the railways. Soon, four children and their dog, illustrated in the same iconic style as the original books, began to pop up in cartoony TV ads and on posters.

The first ad, “Five Get There First”, achieved an impressive 4.7 out of 5 on System 1’s Test Your Ad rating. The campaign is credited with generating 14.9 million additional GWR journeys and £200m in revenue.

As the creators, adam&eveDDB, reported in their IPA entry, “A jolly good result all round.”

Can behavioural science help us understand this success?

We feel their pain

The Five Get There First ad features the children catching a train to the beach in a race against their aunt and uncle, who are driving. Of course, the train passengers arrive first and are relaxing on a picnic rug when the others arrive, late, hot and dishevelled from their disastrous road trip.

The ad works so well because it uses what behavioural scientists call the identifiable victim effect. That is, we are more likely to empathise with negative experiences if we can see and identify with a specific person who suffers.

It’s an example of why storytelling is so powerful. Some evidence for this effect comes from a 2007 study led by Deborah Small at the University of Pennsylvania who explored how the identifiable victim effect would affect charitable giving.

The psychologists asked 121 participants to read a short passage describing food shortages in Africa, in exchange for a five dollar fee. Half read a case study in which victims were described in statistical terms (e.g. “Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children…”). The other half read the story of an individual (e.g. “Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa. Rokia is desperately poor, and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation…”).

Participants were then asked if they would like to donate to the charity, Save The Children, with the money they had earned for taking part in the study.

The results were clear: those who had read an individual victim’s story gave more than double those who had read about the victims in statistical terms (average donation = $2.83 vs. $1.17).

This study is just one of many. In 2016, Seyoung Lee and Thomas Hugh Feeley, from University at Buffalo in New York, conducted a meta-analysis to understand its broader impact. Their analysis of 41 studies confirmed that the identifiable victim effect significantly increases intent and action (i.e. intention to contribute money, intention to contribute time or actual contribution of money).

Many marketers faced with the brief of boosting train travel might have gone down the track of communicating the statistics. The average time saved, for example. But that would have left the audience unmoved. Instead, in Five Get There First, we empathise with the poor folk who had to travel by car and are inclined to avoid that fate for ourselves.

And of course, we have not just identifiable victims, but a recognisable set of heroes too. Far better to join them in the comfort of the train.

Delight over duty

There’s another behavioural science trick that GWR is harnessing with their Famous Five ads. One of the stated aims of the campaign was to encourage travellers to switch from cars and planes — there’s a clear environmental benefit to this transition since train travel has a much smaller carbon footprint.

It would have been easy to include explicit messaging about the rational ecological advantage of train travel in their comms — but GWR didn’t do this. And according to the evidence, that was a wise decision.

Because studies show that our decisions are more likely to be driven by appeal than duty.

For example, in 2019, The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and The World Resource Institute (WRI) tested what might encourage people to pick meat-free options — which are healthier and better for the environment. They showed 2,000 participants different menus, each containing one vegetarian dish and four non-vegetarian dishes.

There were various menu versions, with the vegetarian options given different names on each, for example, meat-free breakfast or field-grown breakfast. Participants were then asked to make their choice.

The results showed clearly that terms highlighting provenance (such as ‘field grown’, ‘garden’) or those using indulgent language (e.g. ‘mild and sweet’, ‘comforting’) boosted the selection of the vegetarian options. In contrast, highlighting the rational reason by describing them as ‘meat-free’ was consistently unpopular. For example, in one test, 7% of people chose the veggie dish when it was labelled meat-free, and 13% chose the same dish when it was called “field grown”.

Plenty of other studies have uncovered similar findings. So, by creating associations with the excitement and adventure of the Famous Five, GWR’s ads were likely to be far more effective than any appeal to our sense of duty to the environment.

Too often, brands with a worthy purpose forget the powerful influence of emotion in their rush to signal moral virtues. It’s a mistake that GWR avoided and it paid off. Using the Famous Five really was a smashing idea.