Health, beauty and wellness retailer Boots has unveiled a new brand platform, which celebrates the “realities of life”.
Titled ‘Give It Some Boots’, the campaign aims to show the role the retailer plays in giving support to its consumers during the “beautiful and brutal” moments of life. It pays tribute to Boots’ heritage but also brings a more “contemporary” feel to the brand.
It will run across TV, cinema, digital out-of-home, in-store and online and is soundtracked to a recreated version of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots are Made for Walking’. The spot shows people navigating different scenarios such as experiencing their first grey hair, trying to pick the perfect skincare routine and a women entering perimenopause.
The campaign stars a No7 Macmillan Beauty Advisor from one of Boots’ stores.
‘Give it Some Boots’ karaoke booths will be taking a trip up and down the country, allowing the retailer to share their own stories.
Convergence of health, beauty and wellness
Charlotte Lock, chief marketing officer at Boots, explains that this campaign gave the retailer the opportunity to tell its story in a different way. It was based off insights it had made that showed health, beauty and wellness missions were “converging”.
Consumers are increasingly looking at all three tasks as a combined shopping mission; people want to look good, feel good and take preventative health measures.
The retailer also took inspiration from its own research. A recent Boots’ study shows September is the new New Year and it wanted to recognise that many people use the month to reset.
She says: “The overall platform about making sure that we’re telling that same story, but telling it with more energy, more colour, more positivity, because we recognise that customers’ lives are really busy.”
“The competition is pretty fierce out there in retail, and we have to cut through the noise. This is really about grabbing the essence of what Boots is about, and showing customers that whatever they’re going through, with Boots there, they can face it with a bit more confidence”.
She also shares that the new campaign is backed by a new visual identity, which highlights “Boots’ Blue”. This identity can be found across the marketing drive’s assets, as well as in stores.
The brand has made the campaign omnichannel, activating through the physical as well as the digital. Lock highlights that there is plenty of fun to come from its karaoke booths to competitions.
All of its brands have really gotten behind the campaign, there are L’Oreal versions, Estee Lauder versions and Procter and Gamble versions. She adds: “Real life activation is something that our shops are brilliant at. Andy, Judy and Adrian, our stores directors, they love nothing more than making retail fun in real life, and there’s a ton of that.”
She says: “Around each of the missions, whether it’s wellness more generally or sleep missions or skin missions, we’ve got depth of content on our website, so you’ll be able to search and understand in detail how Boots can support those individual missions. Across social media, we’ve activated a huge influencer base. We’ve got relationships, strong relationships, with about 200 influencers. So we’ve asked them to make it their own as well.”
Saliency
The retailer will measure the success of the campaign on perception and behavioural metrics. They want to see how meaningful the retailer is in peoples lives, “their saliency” and their preferences.
Lock highlights that Boots measures these carefully and of course the retailer has targets it wants to hit for the campaign. It has also researched extensively, looking at everything from the concept stage to automatics to early edits. Boots partners with System One and the creative testing platform DAIVID to ensure its messaging is clear.
Some of the metrics it looks at beyond advertising impact is the whether there is higher engagement with the products and lines it is featuring in its campaigns.
“We want to sell more as well. We want them to come to Boots to buy their health, wellness, and beauty goods. We’re a commercial business as well as a business with a strong purpose. But we also want to make sure that those added value things are really understood, appreciated, and used by our customers.”
According to Lock, the retailer wants the customer to feel a strong emotional connection to the brand. She adds that the retailer wants to be noticed.
“Bbeing noticed, being understood for the things that we offer, and being preferred – we measure each of those things in the conceptual period, but also as the campaign rolls out.”
Heating up
Lock highlights that the turn around on the campaign was “pretty tight”. She only joined the business ten months ago and Boots is now launching a new campaign, complete with a full brand and visual identity refresh.
The retailer also had to compete with the weather. One scene in the hero spot was recorded using a thermal heat camera, which the retailer was using to depict perimenopause. However, it was hard to shoot because it was the middle of a heatwave and everything was bright red- the whole room, everyone in it and even the walls were all bright red.
She explains that the retailer originally thought it would have to heat up its actresses in post production. However, in reality it had to cool everyone else down! And alongside the heat, the team also had to deal with the smell of the bins that they had been positioned next to.
Lock says: “If anybody thinks marketing is glamourous, I have evidence to the contrary.”
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