2019 was a year of transformation for Boots. Twenty six new beauty brands including the likes of Fenty and Lime Crime had been introduced, a whole new wellness range was now in distribution and a new concept store opened in Covent Garden. The problem was the engrained prejudice about Boots’ Christmas offer. Especially in a year when, due the conomic uncertainty of Brexit, people decided to buy fewer but better gifts for Christmas. Add to that the steep crisis high street shops were in because of the tough competion of online shopping.

Boots is a well-loved British institution. But when it comes to Christmas gifting, they’re considered a last resort, rather than a first choice. We needed an idea that would shake up our customer’s perceptions of the brand, while solving one of Christmas’s biggest dilemmas: what to buy all the weird, wonderful people you call family and friends. This year, more than ever, the public had little money to waste on the wrong gift.

To get the reappraisal we needed, we wanted to go beyond the classic edits: for Mum, for Dad, for the younger one. We went for tribes that existed in culture and would get people to think differently about Boots Christmas. We mined search data and cultural trends and explored behavioural insights and contextual Christmas opportunities - as tribes aren’t just about passions (eg, last minute shoppers are a tribe at Christmas). From this, we identified hundreds of different cultural tribes your friends and family would belong to, no matter how niche, and Boots had perfect gifting solutions for each of them.

We made individual Boots shops for every single type of person (literally). And we called them Bootiques. The Bootiques were everywhere: from in-store, to social media, to Out of Home, to physical pop up stores. We used a data-driven approach to make sure the right people saw the right Bootiques, at the right time. Every execution was shoppable, with interactive links to the e-comm page of every single item in the campaign. Even the ones in OOH and print ads.

We also leveraged Boots enormous loyalty card database, allowing our customers to personalise the experience at scale and create millions more Bootiques. These were then shared on their social feeds, which also became data points to inform our campaign.

We targeted the Bootiques with over 130,000 message variations, and engaged with the right people at the right time.

We ran targeted ads with over 130.000 message variations.

Social awareness went up by 907% (year on year).

We had a 223% return on ad spend against our benchmark.

And a digital value activity purchase conversion Over £6.9m.