Advertising Against the Government: Nationalised Industry Advocacy Advertising 1970-1985

Abstract

From 1970, slogans such as “British Gas is a national asset”, “Why you can take coal for granted”, “British industry deserves better lighting” and “How BOAC takes good care of you and Britain” headlined advertisements in a number of national newspapers. Such taglines were designed to advocate for its position of nationalised industries in the national economy. Using the case of the nationalised energy sector (and drawing upon materials from other nationalised industries) this paper shows how advertising was used to talk directly to the British public about political issues. In so doing, this paper seeks to fill an important gap in both the literature of nationalised industries and marketing scholarship. The wider public sector has rarely been historicised, and where they have tend to argue that the sector had no marketing culture. This paper seeks to challenge the literature and argue that nationalised industries did have marketing cultures. However, those cultures were subject to unique pressures felt only by nationalised industries and therefore had to evolve in different ways to respond to those pressures. This paper examines the broader tensions between the many stakeholders of the nationalised industries and their relationship to the marketing process, including the owners (the general public), the Government(s) and the staff. As a managerial process, marketing was often thought of by these stakeholders as a secondary endeavour.