Boots Wellness Reboot

2019 was the year that wellness broke out and became a mainstream thing. We were all a bit battered by politics, economics, Brexit, etc so the thought of looking after ourselves a bit better came as a welcome antidote.

Boots was really well positioned to be at the forefront of this surge. Their no-nonsense approach allowed them to cut through all the Goop-style pretentiousness and offer practical solutions.

Plus, with a name like Boots, it lent itself perfectly to what we wanted Britain to do.

On January 1, we asked people not to make the high-minded, impossible-to-achieve New Year’s resolutions that never last. Instead, we asked them to make small changes to their lifestyle that they could actually do – and keep doing.

We teamed up with Public Health England to raise awareness of wellness through a quick quiz.

The resulting score gave you (and us) an indication of which areas in your lifestyle could be improved.

And it gave us a launchpad to invite customers on 4 separate personalised wellness journeys, filled with tips, hints, apps and exercises in the areas of nutrition, exercise, sleeping and quitting smoking. 

The campaign stretched across press, posters and instore, making a BIG splash. It included over 50 emails, all written by yours truly. 

In fact, it turned out to be much bigger than anticipated.

By the end of the first 2 weeks in January, wellness revenues had shot up to £4.5 million a week. We had been forecast to expect 140,000 visits to the landing page – we got 675,000.

We also got 11.3 million Facebook impressions – that’s 201.4K more than usual.

190,000 people took the quiz, with 53% of them signing up for their reboot journey.

It was one of the most spectacular campaign launches that Boots had ever seen.

It looks like Britain was well and truly ready for a reboot. And then along came a pandemic…