Give It Some Boots

There’s more than one way for a 180-year-old brand to stay relevant. You can spend a lot of time talking about relevance. Or you can put a “You Can Tame Messy” ad next to an article about Messi on the eve of England’s World Cup semi-final. Boots opted for the latter. It's a small, rather neat example of what's going on behind "Give It Some Boots", the new campaign from Boots and WPP that launched last week.

The campaign is big and glossy - with a joyous soundtrack (a swaggering, contemporary reworking of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”), a cast of real people, humour, and unexpectedly, a silver ballerina.

This is Charlotte Lock’s first major brand campaign since joining Boots last November as its customer and marketing director. She has been at Boots for around ten months, having arrived in November after a career spent inside some of Britain’s most familiar and loved institutions: almost nine years at the BBC, then the Co-op, three years at John Lewis and Waitrose, and a brief spell at the V&A. These are not brands that need introducing. They arrive with history and affection. And Lock seems to rather like that. Boots may be the most familiar of the lot.

"Consumers love us for that trusted relationship, but we're also operating in a very competitive wellness and beauty market where inspiration and discovery are as important as trust. New entrants, big American beauty brands, and digital platforms have all changed the landscape. It's a great market to be in because it's growing, but growth attracts competition. So we have to be more than trusted. We have to tell our story in a way that is compelling and unmissable," says Lock about the campaign.

"So it's about bringing that expertise in, recognising that people's lives are busy and the environment is noisy, but doing it in a way that has more entertainment, more confidence and more pep in its step. The outcome is that customers feel more confident because we're on their side."

Making trust active

But Lock's ambition is not really about making a big ad. It is about changing how people see a brand they already know and making Boots feel fresh, surprising and culturally relevant again. And, crucially, doing it without pretending Boots needs to become something it isn't. Lock is very clear about that. “I’m very respectful of what’s gone before. I've joined a successful business, and it's successful because it's had successful leadership. I'm certainly not here to say that everything that came before was wrong.”

Lock joined Boots with a marketer’s instinct for the assets already on the balance sheet. Her starting point is what Boots already has: trust, expertise, pharmacy, people, shops, data, loyalty and an extraordinary amount of history. The challenge, as she sees it, is that trust can be a rather passive relationship. “Trust can create quite a rational, passive relationship with customers, but we need it to be active.” That meant moving beyond the old category logic of pharmacy over here, beauty over there, wellness somewhere else. Customers do not live that way, she explains.

That is the thinking behind "Give It Some Boots". It's about organising the brand around the things people are actually trying to navigate, from skin and sleep to wellness, recovery, and the more difficult moments of life.

For VML chief client officer, international markets, Pip Hulbert, that approach is part of what has made Lock’s arrival so energising. “It's been really inspiring for the agency to partner with her because it's a difficult role to step into. It's a big job and a lot of responsibility given the heritage of the brand. When you tell friends, family and neighbours that you're working with Boots, everybody has an opinion. It feels like their brand. It's incredibly relevant to people, so Charlotte is effectively holding the keys to the crown jewels. What's been refreshing is the courage and bravery she's brought to the brief.”

The research behind the campaign (carried out by the retailer in partnership with WPP PR) found something familiar but rarely admitted: the gap between how confidently people present themselves and how confident they actually feel.

Lock explains: “A lot of people don't feel that they're able to achieve even day-to-day tasks. They don't feel on top of things. There's a gap between how you present yourself and the confidence you actually feel, whether it's something big or something small.” The creative doesn't try to smooth that gap away .The mum and daughter in the film are real. The mum in the film is going through cancer treatment and experiencing hair loss. And there's a real Boots Macmillan-trained adviser.

But this is not a worthy Boots film about difficult things. There is dancing. There is joy. There is a little magic. “We didn't want to make the film feel worthy or overly descriptive. We wanted to acknowledge those more vulnerable moments while still making the whole thing feel joyful, magical and uplifting. I think that's where the balance comes from," she adds.

Beyond the category

The challenge, of course, is that the high street is a very different place from the one Boots grew up in. Beauty and wellness are crowded with new entrants, trending global brands and digital platforms, while discovery happens far beyond the shop floor. The high street is no longer the only place a customer encounters a beauty product, or even the first.

For Lock, that makes the question of how Boots uses its existing trust particularly important. "Part of it was therefore a marketing job: telling the story in a way that connects emotionally. And I think we've also given the brand permission to have a bit of humour."

Hulbert thinks that permission is important. There have apparently been moments when WPP has deliberately tried to frighten its client. Hulbert says, "sometimes before a presentation, I've said to Charlotte, ‘Right, we're going to scare you now, and you might have to rein us in.’ We've really tried to push it. What's been fantastic is Charlotte's willingness to allow the creative process to build in partnership with us."

The cultural relevance of the campaign is most visible in the work that appears outside the hero film. For instance, Lock talks about the Boots press ad that used the solar eclipse as a real-time creative execution. The campaign, from WPP Media, promoting its skincare range for dark spots ran across Mail Metro Media. "That's what I love about WPP. We talk about showing up in culture in a relevant way. But if you've got a 40-week planning process, you're not necessarily going to be able to react to something that happens tomorrow. But the team regularly comes to us and says, ‘We've got this. What do you think? Should we put it out there?". Some work, she says, has been turned around in 24 hours. "We've had placements booked in and then pivoted the copy for those moments across different channels. I've told the team: if you come up with something, just bring it to us."

A culture of partnership

Hulbert says the effect is contagious. "Charlotte has the appetite for it, which means we feel that we have permission." And permission, in this case, seems to have changed the behaviour of this partnership

“It's been important to establish that culture of partnership because, as Charlotte says, there are several creative teams involved. Because they've been given that permission, it's not unusual for someone to text me at 10pm on a Friday night saying, ‘What about this?’. Then I'll send something back over the weekend. Everyone is invested.”

That is perhaps a more useful definition of cultural relevance than the usual presentation slide. "The You Can Tame Messy" line becomes something else when it appears next to a story about Lionel Messi on the eve of England’s semi-final.

Lock likes the contextuality of it. “The placements have been brilliant because they're contextual. An eclipse execution sits under an article about the eclipse. A Messi execution appears alongside an article about being messy.” There's a slightly old-school pleasure in that. "I love the idea that people are opening the Metro and smiling because of something Boots has done," says Lock.

A very integrated ecosystem

For all the spontaneity, the machinery underneath "Give It Some Boots" is substantial. Boots has design, brand visual identity, media, creators, retail, Advantage Card and Boots Retail Media Group, as well as the brands it sells. WPP's ambition has been to make those different capabilities part of the same creative system. Therefore, a fully integrated model.

Hulbert is careful about what she means by integrated.

“It's the opportunity to sit in a room and look at a brief genuinely together. When I say integrated, I don't mean simply making a campaign and executing it. We've got design, brand visual identity and other experts working alongside the creative community, all coming together under Simon Lloyd's (deputy chief creative officer at VML for EMEA) leadership. That's quite a big thing. You've got brands left at the door and everybody working together.”

Lock's version of integration is similarly practical. “A television ad doesn't need to do everything. Credit to the WPP Media team for looking at each of those missions and asking where we should show up with breadth and where we should show up with depth.” It's an approach that makes a very large business feel slightly more nimble.

Beyond the advertising platform

Perhaps the most interesting test is happening away from advertising altogether. Boots launched "Give It Some Boots" internally in Nottingham, streaming the campaign to stores. More than 50,000 colleagues are part of the business. The campaign was pushed through internal channels, and the response, Lock says, was immediate. “Pride, I think. Real pride.”

Stores have organised their own competitions to run alongside and are also making their own dances to the soundtrack. “I've worked in lots of different retailers throughout my career, and there genuinely is no place like retail to galvanise a movement. The people who work in stores are passionate about their customers and passionate about their jobs. Giving them something they can own and have fun with will be the test of this," she says.

It is also why Lock is keen for the platform to connect back to things only Boots can credibly talk about. “We need to make sure the things that only Boots can do - free derm skin scans, dermatologicall-trained pharmacists, new services we're providing for the NHS - can be talked about through this new campaign lens.” The advertising is not the end of the story. It is the lens through which the rest of the business can start to tell its own story.

What's in store for Christmas?

At Boots, she says, she has the backing of the executive team and the opportunity to work across brand, customer, data, loyalty, and technology. For WPP, it means having a client who understands that good creative work requires a certain amount of risk. “I want them to have the confidence and freedom to do their best work.”

Which brings us to Christmas - the big one in the British advertising calendar.

There is, for now, little to reveal. The team is shooting, director Phoebe Arnstein from Biscuit Filmworks is back on set, and Lock is busy watching the clips.

“It's very different."

What happens next

Lock is careful not to overclaim for a campaign that has only just launched. “We only launched last week, so I'm not going to sit here and say it's a resounding success. We'll see what consumers think, and we'll adapt and change. We're confident we've landed on something special, though.”

There is a platform to build. Creator activity is coming. Macro and nano influencers have been given freedom to interpret the campaign for their own communities. More work will go deep into individual customer missions. A karaoke booth will travel around the country. The ambition is not simply to make people remember an ad. It is to give Boots something it can keep doing. For now, the early signs are perhaps less about metrics than behaviour. People inside Boots are dancing to it. The WPP creative team is still sending ideas late on Friday nights. And a 180-year-old brand is finding itself next to Messi in the newspaper.

Hulbert heard one reaction from someone who saw the campaign. “A few people who saw it last night said, ‘That's not what I was expecting'. That’s exactly what I wanted,” she says. “The fact that people are surprised means they're reappraising Boots and what it stands for. That's exciting.”

Lock puts it more simply. “I think it's unmistakably Boots, but it's fresh. It has cut-through in a different way.”

For a marketer whose career has taken her through some of Britain's most recognisable brands, perhaps that's the interesting challenge at Boots: the opportunity is not to reinvent it, but to make people look twice