Podcast Summary

The Watercress Line is a heritage railway in Hampshire, England that preserves and celebrates the history of steam and early diesel locomotives. As a heritage railway, the line faces unique marketing challenges - it must appeal to a diverse range of customers, from families on day trips to steam enthusiasts, while also recruiting and retaining volunteers with specialised technical skills. The CEO, Rebecca Dally, and volunteer marketer, Christian Pratt, discuss how they market the railway's "smile" and experience-based offerings, segment their audience, and adapt to changing customer expectations. They also highlight the railway's commitment to inclusion and diversity, as well as its innovative approach to fundraising and recycling. Overall, the Watercress Line provides an interesting case study in heritage sector marketing and operations.

 

Transcript

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Kiran Kapur, Host (00:02):
Hello and welcome. This week on the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, we are out of the studio and as you can possibly hear, I'm surrounded by engines. We've come out to the wonderful Watercress Heritage Railway, and I am joined by Christian Pratt and Rebecca Dally, who have the wonderful job of marketing this railway. Rebecca, would you like to explain a little bit about the Watercress Line?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (00:24):
Yes, the Watercress line's a heritage railway in Hampshire. So we've got 10 miles of track that were closed in the 1960s and have been redone as a visitor of traction, part of the heritage preservation movement where a huge number of bits of old track were preserved in the 1960s and 1970s by volunteers. And those volunteers kept going with steam engines that were taken out of service by British Rail. And this has been the fate of a huge amount of track in the UK because obviously we were very early adopters of the railways. This piece is a particularly interesting one because we were a strategic mainline down to the south coast. So we're a heritage railway that has a standard gauge track, but we're actually in quite a busy area. So we just go between the towns of Alton, which is on the end of the main line from Waterloo down to a lovely little Georgia market town called S Oxford.

(01:29):
And it used to be famous for being a major market for Watercress, which is a salad product that gets grown in the beautiful chalk streams of the South Downs, which is now a national park on the edge of the watercress line. So we've got a heritage railway that runs Steam and diesels. So mostly you can hear diesels today, we very much focus on the last generation of steam and we keep alive the skills and the memories of that last generation of steam and the first generation of diesel. And we do that all year round, mostly using volunteers. Fantastic.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:07):
And I have to say, it's a wonderful place to be. There are definitely days, where I love my job. Christian, I know that you have come here as a volunteer and you're helping out with fundraising for a particular project. Would you like to explain what it's like to first come and work here, and volunteer here?

Christian Pratt, volunteer Watercress Line (02:22):
That's right. Rebecca's brought me down to help with the campaign to raise money for Canpac, which is one of the locomotives at the railway are currently restoring. But as you and Daniel have experienced today, coming down here for the first time and coming back here repeatedly, it's just a wonderful physical experience. We're used to working in offices with desk and overhead lighting and it's warm and cosy. We are standing now on a damp platform. We're sheltering from the rain. We can smell smoke, we can smell diesel, there's thrumming going on. It's a wonderful environment in which to think, well, this is what we're marketing, we're talking about marketing today, this is what we have to work with, the materials to appeal to the railways audiences and the customers. And for me as a career marketer, it's lovely to be able to come to an environment with a product, if I can call it that, in the most simple of senses that you can see here and smell and you get it. It's very easy to understand what it is that you are trying to market because it's literally all around you and you can see customers being excited and surprised and delighted by it. And that's wonderful. So it really does bring the job to life, if you will.

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:28):
Rebecca, I know you are the CEO here, so you're overall in charge. What's your product here? What are you selling?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (03:34):
We are selling a smile. We're selling a fantastic day out for people to make connections both with their own families, with our volunteers, and with the past. So one of the things that has been very fascinating for me is not coming from a Heritage Railway background, is to come in and say, absolutely ask that question. What is the product that we're selling and how can we make sure that that is a product that people will continue to want to buy for a very long time? So the experience economy is a very particular one and one that Christian and I have worked in for many years, particularly when it comes to working heritage as we call this here. We've got working locomotives, we've both worked together in the past and working aviation, historic aviation. So that experience economy is a very particular, has a very particular set of marketing challenges. And you are as thrown by the vagaries of the market as any product, but you are absolutely part of a discretionary spend environment, which is very, very challenging at the moment in a time when your product is also very movable because the costs of the product change more quickly, I suspect than most businesses.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:59):
So you've both hinted and you both mentioned that you've worked elsewhere. Where was that?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (05:05):
Very briefly, Christian was my boss at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford where I went to set up a commercial department for the Imperial War Museum where we ran air shows and had a major visitor attraction. And Christian came in as the head of marketing there.

Christian Pratt, volunteer Watercress Line (05:23):
Exactly that. That's right. And it was very much an environment where as we have here at Watercress, the Watercress line, there's stuff, there was hangers of aircraft, there's a working airfield, we had a visitor traction, we had a museum, we had a heritage offer as well. So that was my first experience of leisure and tourism in the heritage sector. And I was there for nine years. Rebecca and I have overlapped Rebecca as not mentioned, but I shall briefly say it now, has gone on to bigger and better things with the RF Museum and Shuttleworth Trust. So that's our shared heritage connection and we spent many happy day with many colleagues at Duxford looking at Spitfires and Lancasters flying and this is enjoying museums. I actually also, and it's funny how in your career as a marketer you think, I wonder if I'll ever use that information again.

(06:08):
I actually worked for the railways for four years. I was head of marketing for what's now called Rail Delivery Group, which I sold rail cards. My job was to sell rail cards and I did that and brick rail and into rail. So four years I did that and it exposed me in a very small way to railway operations. And when there was a problem with trains somewhere or a line buckle, it affected my ticket, my ticket sales, my rail car sales. So you never don't carry used forward useful information as a marketer. And actually that's stuff that, so now Rebecca's running the railway here and I can relate to some of the operational stuff because I did it 20 years ago.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:49):
We've moved further along the platform and you may be able to hear there's a train coming into the station. One of the things I wanted to ask about was how you segment your customers and how you look at the product that you are offering them. Because when I was thinking about this, I thought the obvious customer was families on days out.

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (07:05):
I think it really depends. There's a perception that heritage railways are all the same because the physical infrastructure is all the same. But the reality as we've looked at the business coming in fairly recently is that there's two very different types of heritage railways. There are the heritage railways that go to a destination that people want to travel to. So those are very often seaside destinations that might be Swanage railway or might be Whitby up in the North York Moors and they are able to fill a train on a holiday day, people having a fun way to get to a destination. But that's not our railway. We are in the wilds of Hampshire. It's not a holiday destination. The biggest market here when you look at Visit England is the visiting friends and relatives market by a long talk. We go past the lovely South Downs National Park, but we are right on the edge of it.

(08:02):
So what we see, what I've seen from ourselves and other railways is that there is an alternative type of railway that is dependent on the events model where we put on very specific events. And that's fine dining, it's bringing people for Halloween, it's a big Christmas offering. We have a wonderful real a train. There's all sorts of reasons for putting people onto a train because a bog standard journey is not enough for them. We haven't got enough of a destination. Alton is a commuter town on the edge of London, so we've got a fantastic market, but we have to bring them to the railway for a reason other than just travelling on a train. And I think that that actually gives us quite a lot of benefit because we are seeing that the whole heritage railway market is changing anyway, where customer expectations are moving very, very fast.

(09:06):
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, sitting on a train, staring out the window, watching the landscape changing was a thing. If you thought you might be bored, you took a book and you chatted to your neighbours and that was an experience. That was your experience of train travel. Now even the underground has got wifi and everyone is on their phones, so people don't know how to enjoy just a heritage rail expert railway journey. And that's an issue that's being seen not just on the preserved railways, which are quite short journeys, but also on the big mainline heritage offerings. So they're doing more and more big catering offerings. But there's a real question of as your market changes, how do you follow that market and make sure that they love it when they get here, but you have to keep them entertained. You have to have, the expectations are constantly rising and therefore, as probably the closest railway to London, we probably see those market changes more quickly than others, but we have a great opportunity to then respond to that and to make sure that we are leading the way in responding to it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:22):
Christian, you've come in to help specifically with a fundraiser. Is it the same target market? Is it waving a bucket as people as they come off the trains or is it something else that you have to do?

Christian Pratt, volunteer Watercress Line (10:32):
That's a good question, isn't it? It's more than that. It has to be because if we start from what Rebecca just described as the simple assumption that the bulk of your audience, the bulk of your visitors are day trippers for want of a better description, that their relationship with the railway and the depth of their pockets, their discretionary spend is not sufficient to raise sort of funds necessary to do the project that I importing to help with. So you think, okay, well where else are we going to find money? Who simplistically we think about our segmentation, who might be interested in the railway, the locomotive, the legacy experience, or have some emotional connection with the railway perhaps through association with their grandparents, their parents who doesn't know about us or who doesn't come on the railway as a matter of course. So you've got to very quickly think about other reasons to be engaged with the railway as a way of segmenting your market.

(11:26):
So it's largely emotional. I would suggest we've got another little train passing through now. And then think about reasons that they might want to get involved in supporting the campaign to see a particular locomotive restored and back on the line. And then you think about as I'm going through our segmentation targeting bit of strategy, okay, how do we reach them? And actually a lot of the work that Rebecca's doing that I've been helping around the edges with has practically nothing to do with people who have a for better description, an existing relationship with the railway. So you're reaching out to what we would know as high net worths in fundraising terms to people far and wide. So there's less of a geographic relationship with the railway. They could be anywhere in the country. They might not be coming to the railway with their children regular weekends, but they nonetheless have a connection that we can tap into, which is then the start of a conversation that should lend lead to fundraising. So that's the long answer. The short answer is you are limited in your ability to raise money by how narrow or broadly you perceive the potential addressable market for those interested people.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:35):
And just to give the audience an idea, how much money are you needing to raise at this stage of the project?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (12:42):
 It's about quarter of million pounds. So the whole project, it's been going on for about 12 years and it's in multimillions.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:53):
So Rebecca, we're walking past some sort of lumps of metal that's about as technical as I get. And there's an anecdote here or a story.

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (13:01):
There is a story. It's one of the things that I think that is very interesting that that railways are seen as a travel activity, but there's so much more to learn about them. And that's part of the challenge of marketing is getting that across to people. So for example, here we're standing next to a huge amount of what looks like slightly rusty metal, but the reality for this is it's a lot of parts of the locomotive that have to come out of casting and forging processes. So we are thinking about creating metal products that get very heated up to a hugely high temperature to be shaped. And then what happens is that the molecules inside are very, very active even once they appear to have cooled down. So they really need to harden, which means just sitting on the shelf for a few years and that sitting on the shelf is known as chilling out. So if you've ever heard the expression chilling out, the reality is that comes from these lovely pieces of very exciting hardware on the railway, which are sitting here chilling out until they've hardened up in the molecules inside have calmed down and that means that they don't wear out quite so quickly.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:08):
Fantastic. And I love the idea of chilling out over a number of years. This is my new motto. So we've come out of the platform and into one of the many sheds here. And again, we are surrounded by very exciting looking machinery. Rebecca, would you like to explain where we are? And then what I really want to talk about is the growth and where you see heritage rails in particularly this one going.

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (14:40):
So when we say shed, we're talking about a major workshop and this is our boiler shop. So there are huge steam engine boilers that we can see that are being repaired and put back into service. It's quite a challenge for the organisation because every 10 years they have to have a major overhaul. So the ones that you can see here have got very, very major overhauls usually made of copper or steel. So expensive, highly technical. It's not just a kettle. It's a very challenging project to put a boiler back together with a lot of specialist skills and it's a highly regulated environment. So the boiler shop here has got some very highly skilled staff and a huge number of volunteers who help us.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:28):
So I think that's possibly a view I certainly had it before I came down that volunteers were possibly older people who'd worked on railways. But from what you're saying, that's not actually necessarily the case.

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (15:38):
That's right. I think the Heritage railway movement was very much set up by volunteers. So it was people who had the skills, whether it was maintaining locomotives or maintaining track. And in the sixties and seventies, people were coming out of the British Railway system and the locomotive works. So down where we are, we have the Eastly Locomotive Works, which was a huge, huge facility and many of the early volunteers would've been highly skilled and would've come from that environment, but the wheel has turned since then. So what I've been fascinated to discover coming into the organisation is that the skilled staff are my paid staff, and they are generally under 40 and they are training up people who in their sixties to come and help and undertake the tasks of whether it's in the boiler shop or in the carriage workshops or in the main works.

(16:38):
So the majority of my volunteers have backgrounds as varied as being surgeons or IT project managers or absolutely anything, but very, very few of them have actually got the heavy industrial skills that you would expect. And funny old thing, we live in Hampshire, it's one of the most expensive parts of the uk. It's very professional. So you are drawing your market for your volunteers. It's no different as to your market for your visitors. It's still a pool of people who are both inclined to give you time and willing to drive the distance to get to you. So that market for us is actually a highly professional market because in a very expensive part of the world, that's who settles here. So you have to then respond as a business to that market as well as understanding who your visitors are, how things have to change for that type of volunteer.

(17:36):
You have to understand, number one, what motivates them because they have a often less manual background. I find it very interesting here because they have quite highly sophisticated ideas of how an organisation should run and the standards of values and behaviours that exist. So heritage railways are seen as fairly roughy tufty places, but I've got a set of people whose expectations are that you have a highly diverse workforce, that your working environment is safe and clean and your facilities are correct and that you are looking after people. So they're a demanding lot and that's absolutely fine. It challenges us and they often have very, very good insights into your business and quite often quite unrealistic expectations of how much money you can apply to it. But it also means that you have to be very realistic about the kind of work that they can undertake. So that working environment can be very important because are making sure that you are not dealing with a 20-year-old or you are dealing with a 50, 60, 70-year-old very often, and therefore you need to make sure that the task and the tools to that task are appropriate for that workforce.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:04):
This is really interesting. So it's stakeholder marketing, but looking at two different types of stakeholders and essentially two different types of customers. So we've moved again and we are now standing on a footbridge, but this is quite a special one. Christian, would you mind giving us the background?

Christian Pratt, volunteer Watercress Line (19:21):
It's a wonderful thing, isn't it? It's a glorious structure. So this was actually built in 1892, but it wasn't built here on the Watercress Line. It was built and installed across the platforms at King's Cross in London. And it was, you could say, made famous by its appearance in films such as Harry Potter and the pH of Stone, a very charismatic structure you'd recognise if you've seen those films. Now, when they redesigned and rebuilt the Concourse platform from concourse at King's Cross recently, relatively recently, there was no place for the bridge. And so it got broken up into lorry size pieces and sent down the, I guess down the M3 to here. So this 200 tonnes worth of metal, eight lorries will say it was re-put together, reconstructed as it was in King's Cross. And we now have that here, the railway line. So it's glorious and you can stand here and as the train's gone underneath, you get covered in soot and smoke and you can feel the heat and the rhythm of the engines working and you get a great view of the South downs as well. So it's a lovely thing to have.

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:22):
So Rebecca, I know there's plenty of other things that you have here that are reused and recycled, so could you give us an overview of some of those?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (20:29):
Yes, almost everything on the railway is recycled, so obviously the most charismatic is going to be the locomotives and the carriages. So there's the things that people see, but almost all the track is recycled. So the track that we've got from here at Rockley up to Alford was actually laid in 1947 and is still going, I wouldn't say going strong. We've got a replacement plan and then the further north is from the 1960s and that was all recycled off the main network. All of our signalling gets recycled. So even when we upgrade signalling today, we tend to be upgrading from 1890 signalling through to 1960 signalling just at the time that the British rail on the main line is going into their digital signalling. So we harvest, if you like, things that would otherwise be thrown away. So buildings rolling, stock track and people's time. Ironically, at the end of the day we are recycling amazing skills from our volunteers as well. They don't go to waste when people finish their careers, they come here and continue to live on. So we are the ultimate recyclers as an organisation.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:45):
So we finally come back into an office because one of the things we have to remember is this is actually a business. And although you have exciting metal things and trains and all sorts of exciting things going on, fundamentally you're running a business. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the elements of the marketing mix. So who comes to your events and how do you get them to do things like a repeat purchase?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (22:06):
There's a really interesting dynamic here in terms of the heritage railways because they have evolved from completely volunteer orientated activities that the way that the mix of products has been developed has been absolutely driven by the enthusiasms of different volunteer groups. So we have got normal daily travel, augmented by group visits and by education visits. But the bulk of our activities in terms of really decent revenue generation is through events and dining. Dining products have been created by volunteers to produce something that they would want to buy. So they've literally gone out and bought the carriages, restored the carriages, they deliver the service, so they cook the food, they serve the food, and they've created that product from scratch. And similarly you'll get somebody who's picked up this weekend's, this week's half term, which is all Halloween themed, and it'll be somebody who's just galvanised a bunch of volunteers and said, let's do this.

(23:17):
Steam Illuminations is a classic example where we have the most extraordinary story of one of the people who volunteers on our foot plate. So that's his hobby is firing steam engines whose day job was doing amazing lighting shows for incredible pop stars like Kylie and Rihanna and people like that lost all his work in Covid obviously when all of those were cancelled and created an incredible interactive light show on a train and in a train. So it's interactive with light up LED wristbands and a GPS controlled story if you like, and lights that can turn different colours so that they don't interact with our signal lights. I mean it's absolutely incredible and yet it's one of our most profitable products. So what I've come into discover is that people have created these products because that's what they wanted to buy rather than being directed from the top.

(24:20):
Everything on the railway tends to emerge from the enthusiasms of people and therefore it's got great authenticity behind it. The challenge for me is then to identify whether there are markets that haven't produced a product because those people are not necessarily on the railway. And I think that's one of the interesting parts about when your volunteer base and your potential visitor base may start to diverge. And I think particularly as we are close to London and therefore there are a lot of people with higher and higher expectations because there's been so much investment in the cultural world in London, it is a centre of the world that those expectations need to then be managed and the products that we deliver here on the railway need to meet up potentially sometimes a higher standard. So we've got a great marketing mix at the moment, but I think that one of the challenges as an organisation is for us to say day out with Thomas for the under fives wizard week for the five to sevens, the real L train for the boys out on the beer, the dining train for Granny or for your Valentine's lovely mealed out the Sunday lunch train for Granny the afternoon coming past beautiful South Downs for your friends from out of town.

(25:52):
All of those actually are promoting repeat visits for our local audience because they're hitting different life moments. Your special occasions you come, whether they're with friends on a dining cream tea or you are buying a lovely driving experience on a steam train for grandpa, you are able to get people to come and join those. And that's even before we've looked at the specialist market, which is the steam enthusiasts of which there are many, but they are probably only five to 10% of our market. So the reality is that people assume that the heritage railway industry is sustained by a specialist train spotter in market, but the reality is that it is your ordinary life stages. And then what we've discovered is that people come from far, far further away than we were expecting. So there are a lot of people who will organise their entire holiday schedule around what they can do on a steam railway.

(26:55):
I've been absolutely blown away because they know that we'll stay in a lovely b and b and we'll do this national trust property and we'll go on that walk and then we'll go on this steam railway. And a steam railway is part of their decision making process because they know it's a known product. It's a bit like understanding, oh, I'm going to go to a zoo, this is what I'm going to get. So understanding what that day out and managing those expectations and then delivering against that is also then a really important part of that marketing mix because it's a staple. When you look at the size of the number of heritage railways in the UK and the size of the whole market, it becomes a staple of this is what you do when you go away on holiday.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:42):
So one of the things that interests me, I get the idea that you get an authenticity when the volunteers put it forward. I mean, what a wonderful way to get an authentic product. When we talk about this, what happens when your market research says actually what you now need is a gin palace or a casino or something and the volunteers are going, I'm not sure about that. That must be quite a challenge.

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (28:04):
It's a huge challenge and part of the wonderful excitement of taking on a heritage railway is the extent to which you are utterly, utterly dependent upon people giving their free time to deliver your products. So you can do one of two things. One is about making sure that you've galvanised people to feel excitement about a new product, and then you can go out and ideally use a base of your existing volunteers and potentially find some new volunteers to come and buy into that. But what I've recognised is that there is a team dynamic. You need to create a team and they become a fairly regular team that deliver the same product again and again and again. And that brings its own peril because they can all get a little bit too tired all at once. So yes, it comes back to that volunteering market and refreshing and renewing that in the same way that you would refresh and renew your audience market.

(29:08):
You are expecting in any visitor attraction that you are losing 10% of your audience every year of your regular audience every year, and therefore even just to stand still, you've got to keep running and nevermind then growing it on and finding, doing what in the heritage world we call audience development. So that's about finding new ways to connect people into the story. So for example, we are just finding ways to connect women into the story of Canadian Pacific, the locomotive that we are restoring because it was built by women during the war. And what we're finding is that a lot of people are suddenly perking up the fact that this is a really untold story in the railway heritage world and actually in the second World War heritage world, nobody seems to have know anything about the fact that there was a whole generation of women building this particular class of locomotive. So it's finding those new ways to engage audiences for that growth as well as running to keep up. But yes, bringing your audience along is not just about your visitors, it's about your volunteers as well.

Kiran Kapur, Host (30:20):
So one of my other questions was about inclusivity because we've walked around today, there's been wonderful, I've watched a little boy playing with Thomas the tank engine, pushing it round a lovely wooden track. We've seen parents with children, I suspect we've seen a couple of grandparents with children as well, and it's lovely. Does every member of society feel included in a heritage side or do you just think that actually you are aiming for a marketplace that wants to buy into that? Or do you feel that's something that you should be widening your audience in?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (30:51):
I think there's a real challenge for the heritage rail industry coming into it from the outside that I think they really lost a PR battle in a big way in the 1980s around the public perception of train spotters. And I find that there is a perception that they're very male environments, there's a perception that they are potentially quite challenging for anybody who doesn't fit the mould. I walked into the organisation expecting therefore to actually not have an easy ride. And what I found very interesting is the extent to which all of those preconceptions have been challenged. So I've had a wonderful welcome from the entire industry as a woman taking over a railway, which actually to be honest was quite a surprise and I found a lot of people who are really interested in understanding how to diversify, but just not having the skills and tools to do that.

(31:51):
So I think you are right that there are challenges on the heritage railway world, but as I trying to work with the wider Heritage Rail Association, which is the governing body for heritage railways, to start to give people the skills and make them realise just number one, how diverse they already are because all of the railways that I've been to are much more diverse in their gender and sexual preferences than people would probably realise. They're much, much more diverse in their neurodiversity, their willingness to absorb people with very, very broad range of NeuroD diversities put all on one side of the spectrum, I can promise you. But it makes them actually really inclusive environments. Now they can come across as quite tribal, but the social value that is contained within a heritage railway is extraordinary and the willingness to open up is there, but not always the tools.

(32:56):
So part of the challenge for the entire sector is to make sure that they are more welcoming and part of that is accessibility, not just in the physical accessibility because they're all organisations that are predicated on or that are recreating the past or just have retained the past often, which is not as physically accessible as you would expect. But they've also been created by volunteers who are passionately knowledgeable about what they've got and they don't understand what it's like to know nothing about railways to when you walk through the door. So there's an important accessibility piece there that then allows everybody to get enthusiastic about the stories. And it doesn't occur to many of the people on the railway to tell a story that will be relevant to women because they don't understand why. That's interesting because very often because of the neurodiversity that they have makes them very, very focused on physical objects rather than people.

(34:01):
We have to just recognise that it's our challenge as a business to manage that neurodiversity in a way that then allows them to feel comfortable to continue with their passion whilst we broaden the story out. So there's a big challenge because you have to recognise what you've got and the strengths of what you've got. At the same time as saying, yeah, I'd really love to have a lot more people of colour on my railway because if I'm representing the 1950s and 1960s, there was an entire generation of people who came to work on the railways from overseas. And am I seeing them in my volunteer best? Not at the moment. Am I on the edge of London? Yes I am. So all of those things are things that will form our next phase of strategic planning in order to make sure that we are as accessible in all of those ways as we possibly can be.

Kiran Kapur, Host (34:53):
What's so important is how inclusive you already are, which perhaps isn't immediately obvious as we walked around, but that's amazing with all the neurodiversity. I mean, many organisations are desperate to try and get to grips and be better at neurodiversity, and it sounds like they have a lot that they could learn from you. It's been an absolutely wonderful time here. I have to say I'm living my best life. And you say you think it's odd that people plan their holidays. You are talking to somebody who actually spent a week in Wales. We were there seven days, we did seven different heritage railways, but I completely get where your audience is. If somebody else like me and I wish I had come across this 20 or 30 years ago is sitting going, how do I get into marketing into a heritage area? How do you do it? How did both of you get into this?

Christian Pratt, volunteer Watercress Line (35:44):
It's a good question, isn't it? I think Rebecca's touched on one of the themes in many of our answers and we've talked about it through this conversation. I think you can either start from marketing and then all you can start from a passion that you have. So my pathway into this sector started as a marketer with a rounded skill, a rounded set of competencies and skills and experience. And I then brought those to bear on the museum at Ducks Oxford and then laterally helping Rebecca here. The other conventional route, and we've talked about it today, is to start as a volunteer. So you might have a career and professional competencies elsewhere, but we've heard already how Rebecca's volunteer force, particularly on the engineering side, are largely people who are not either engineers nor railway enthusiasts professionally, if you will. If those two work, they've come to the railway because it's a passion and they bring skill sets which are not immediately relevant to the railway, but they bring a passion and an energy and crucial as volunteers their time.

(36:47):
How does that work for a career pathway? I think what it means is you've got something that you're interested in that happens to involve museums, heritage, or even the broader leisure and tourism sectors. You will have a natural knowledge and enthusiasm for those and that should guide you. And oftentimes open doors, because so many of these organisations and institutions are desperate for staff, they're desperate for extra hours each week. And if you can go in as volunteer, they're working with open arms and if you can then use that experience to then add on top of that your marketing competence, then you'll get to the same end result. So I started with marketing and happened to land a role that allowed me to express my enthusiasm, energy for aviation. Rebecca, I think has done a similar pathway. And of course over time you then become better both at marketing, running businesses in Rebecca's case, and then you gain your sector knowledge too. So it kind of works both ways. I think the simple answer, that's the long answer ki and the simple answer is if you want to get into the sector, get involved in the sector. If you get involved through marketing or through volunteering or just having a particular interest in it and becoming, if you will, a subject matter expert, any one of those ways is enough, but choose one of those, start delivery with it and the rest will naturally tend to follow on.

Kiran Kapur, Host (38:04):
Rebecca, can I ask you the same question? How did you end up where you are?

Rebecca Dally, CEO Watercress Line (38:08):
Well, I certainly started with passion because aviation was my passion as a young person. So I learned to fly and I had aspirations with career in the Royal Air Force, which didn't didn't come off. So when I went to knock on the door of someone like the Imperial War Museum at Oxford, knowing the difference between a spitfire and a hurricane was a definite advantage even though it had absolutely nothing to do with my job. Because when you go into these organisations, you've got to remember that most of the people who are there, they are definitely not there for the money. They are definitely not there for the work-life balance. They are there because they're passionate about what they do, and it can be a great career, but it's never going to be a lucrative one, and it's never going to give you a lot of time for anything else.

(39:01):
A passion really helps because other people around you will really expect you to be passionate. However, I say that advisedly because I have a most fabulous marketing manager here whose passion is not necessarily railways, whose background is very much in fast consumer goods, and that FMCG background makes her a fantastic bums on seat marketer. And I ring fence her like you wouldn't believe with all of the amazing things that go on on the railway. I just need her right now to help me put bums on seats. I've talked a lot about change and increasing the audience base and all those kinds of things. She's out there doing the absolutely critical marketing in the very traditional ways of particularly around digital marketing because obviously that's the most bang for our buck these days. And we gain more and more digital and our audience base is getting younger and younger, so they're more traditionally focused.

(40:09):
But then wrestling with the fact that we've also then got a very important audience who don't do digital and they need print and they need more traditional forms of marketing. So balancing that in the context of a very, very, very, very tight budget. So passion will always help cover over the cracks of the fact that someone's going to give you terrible pay and ask you to work a ridiculous number of hours, but you might just have a steam train running past your window or you might just have a spitfire taking off outside your door. And those things, I can promise you, if you have the passion, absolutely make it worth it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (40:49):
What a brilliant way to round off what's been a fantastic day. Thank you both very much for your time, your expertise, and for showing us around. It's been absolutely wonderful. Thank you.