Why Boots decided to give health and beauty the same treatment
For The Drum’s Health & Pharma Focus, we sat down with chief marketing officer Pete Markey to discuss the latest trends and how the retailer is responding to them.
How Boots is tapping into health trends / Pexels
Most major pharmacies sell concealer alongside cough medicine, but that doesn’t mean they treat health and beauty equally. Walgreens-owned Boots, the UK’s largest pharmacy chain, didn’t... until now.
When we catch up with CMO Pete Markey, he explains: “There is this trend where people are more interested in health, beauty and skin and all of this is being seen together. We see those worlds converge a lot more.”
And so Boots is reacting to this trend by evolving the way it promotes its products, both through online marketing activity and in-store positioning. “More and more, we are seeing it as a holistic offering.”
Boots’ newly opened, beauty-dedicated store in Battersea Power Station is an example. The store sells makeup and cosmetics, has state-of-the-art skin scanning technology and has a dermatologist-trained pharmacist. Boots plans to roll out dermatology to its 4,000 pharmacists – another recognition of how beauty concerns have blurred into general health.
Markey credits Boots’ internal culture for allowing the retailer to respond to this trend. The retailer has three main units: health, beauty and general merchandise. Traditionally, there has been much separation but now it has a ‘go-to-market’ team that sits within Markey’s marketing department, working to connect the dots between health and beauty, uncovering trends and synergies.
“Who better than Boots to bring the worlds of health and beauty together for skincare than Boots because of our heritage and the brands we work with?”
Laughter is the best medicine
Markey also points out how humor has increasingly been finding its way into health marketing, a category that has historically avoided comedy.
Boots’ most recent health campaign was a series of episodic ads that tell light-hearted stories about how people get ill. “We have these slices of life with a touch of humor that people can relate and each campaign should feel like it’s a companion to the other,” says Markey of the creative approach. “It’s just a fun way to dramatize what we do.”
Adding humor to health ads is a delicate balancing act, he says. Brands need to be seen as authorities, so they often play it safe with informative and risk-free ads. For this campaign, though, he tells us: “There was a bit of license to just relate to people’s lives a bit more and play it with a bit of humor to say that we’ve all been there.”
The ads generated the biggest-ever hit of traffic to the Boots Health page from a campaign, with 356,000 views on the first day and currently tracking at 1.2m views.