Insight-Led PR Campaign
West Midlands Railway - Mind the Gap
How Tribera turned the quietest week of the rail calendar, the lull between Christmas and New Year, into a 19% jump in journeys for West Midlands Railway.
BACKGROUND
West Midlands Railway came to us for help with Twixmas, the week between Christmas and New Year and one of the hardest trading windows in rail. Commuter demand disappears, routines break down, and even the audiences who are free to travel aren't in a planning mindset. The default is to stay home. WMR's initial brief was straightforward: support a promotional offer to fill the lull. We pushed back on the framing. Price alone wasn't the problem, and discounting into an audience that has mentally switched off tends to move existing demand around rather than create new demand. We proposed proving that with research and building a campaign around the behaviour, using the offer as the conversion mechanism once intent existed.
CLIENT CHALLENGE
WMR needed to do two things at once: shift audiences away from passive, home-based behaviour, and convert that shifted intent into ticket sales. A straight promotional push was unlikely to achieve the first, which meant the second would underperform too. Timing added pressure. The live offer ran for just ten days, so the campaign platform had to land immediately rather than build gradually.
TRIBERA'S SOLUTION
We commissioned a survey of 2,000 UK adults to map how people actually spend Twixmas. The findings gave us cultural permission to say out loud what everyone quietly recognises: 40% feel they waste the week, 42% default to staying home, 15% feel guilty about not getting out, and 10% admit to showering less. That data became the campaign foundation.
We took the most recognisable phrase in British rail and reframed it. "Mind the Gap" became a cultural prompt to bridge the strange pause between Christmas and New Year by getting out and rediscovering the region. The story came first, the discount came second.
We ran it in three phases. Tease: PR and organic social planted the Twixmas idea in national titles including The Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star before any offer appeared, seeding the story and building search authority. Engagement: influencer and paid social on Meta and TikTok met people where they were during Twixmas, at home, reflecting their behaviour back without judgement. Conversion: once intent existed, paid search, display, CRM and station media carried the 50% Off-Peak Day Return to an audience already primed to act.
THE RESULTS
The campaign generated substantial revenue from 393,197 journeys, a 19% year-on-year increase in one of rail's lowest-demand weeks. The number that proves the strategy is 46%: nearly half of all purchasers said they hadn't planned to travel at all before the campaign reached them. That is new demand created by a story, not existing demand redistributed by a discount.
New customer acquisition rose 41%, and PR secured 58 pieces of coverage across 25 national titles. The effect outlasted the offer too: 89% of people felt more favourable towards WMR afterwards, 77% said they were more likely to travel by train in future, and 76% planned further rail journeys beyond the campaign.
"Mind the Gap" won Gold for Best Travel Campaign at the Performance Marketing Awards, Silver for Marketing Campaign of the Year at the Travel Marketing Awards, and a win for Use of Research at PR Daily's Content Marketing Awards, with a further finalist place at the Midlands Marketing Awards.
Tribera led strategy, PR, influencer, paid social and content. Media amplification by Anything is Possible. Creative production and CRM by WMR's in-house team.