The 175-year-old Influencer: Building brands since 1849
Boots Media Group
Accelerating brand growth through unrivalled access to the UK Health and Beauty consumer.
As Boots UK celebrates 175 years on the high street this year, we wanted to look back on our research with MESH Experience into how brands can accelerate their brand equity with the UK’s no.1 trusted brand…
Retail media today
Traditionally manufacturers invested in brand building activity through their own marketing and advertising, with retailer advertising managed separately by trading and sales teams working directly with the key account retailers.
However, changes in recent years have highlighted the need for marketers to engage people with their brands across every touchpoint, putting retail under the spotlight.
The dramatic shift from offline to online browsing and purchasing, paired with the rise of social media and consumers' declining attention spans, has driven brands to take a deeper look into the shopper journey and increase spending on creating content to engage through niche channels.
Boots Media as a brand builder
To gain a deeper understanding of the role that Boots plays in building brand equity, Boots teamed up with The MESH Experience to launch a comprehensive study measuring how shoppers respond to different types of media, both from Boots Media and the brand’s channels, how Boots Media fares within this mix, and the impact Boots Media has on a shopper's perception of the manufacturer's brands.
Participants for this study were collected directly from the Boots Advantage Card customer panel, ensuring that the audience was engaged, a key target for premium beauty, and due to receive upcoming Boots Media Group communications.
The study, carried out by MESH experience, included participants completing a ‘PRE’ Survey which captured brand health metrics and imagery information, before moving on to capturing brand experiences in real-time through recordings of experiences participants had with the brands across any given touchpoint in that time period. The participants then completed the final survey, much like the first one, to measure the relative impact for brand health metrics.
At each stage, participants commented on their experience, which, along with the data captured, was analysed using MESH's 'Experience Maximiser’ technique. This technique highlighted the relative impact a Boots Media Group (BMG) experience had on several key metrics and perceptions towards brands.
The results
The results of the study found that Boots Media not only gets brands noticed with their unique channel mix, but it’s vital to brands, specifically those just emerging in the market, and it acts as a sales driver.
Boots Media gets brands noticed
BMG’s unique channel mix got brands noticed over twice more than all other retailers combined through its ability to reach people via channels that brands would otherwise struggle to use efficiently and across a broad demographic profile. It also provides a way for consumers to engage and discover brands through a range of Boots channels they know, trust, and rely on for inspiration and reassurance.
The Impact on Brand Building
The study also found that Boots Media could be vital for emerging brands in the market. Evidence showed that established brands are being noticed through their own channels (by 24% of participants); however, this was much lower for an emerging brand, at just 13%. Meanwhile, around a third of participants were experiencing both brands through Boots Media.
Not only does this prove that BMG can help to build brands, but the results found that a BMG experience makes shoppers 1.7x more likely to improve consideration and 2x more likely to become recommenders of the brand as a result. MESH hypothesised that Boots’ legacy as a high street staple for 175 years positions them as a credible and impartial source of advice to customers and a brand partner, encouraging accessibility and familiarity with customers in a unique and trusted way that brands might struggle to achieve alone.
Effectively driving sales
Finally, Boots Media Group is proven to be an effective brand sales driver. As the UK’s leading Health & Beauty Retailer, MESH expected this to be the case, with shoppers 5% more likely to purchase because of a BMG experience. However, what was most notable was the ability for a Boots experience to increase basket spend by 24% for those who decided to make a purchase.
Summary
In their report, MESH confirmed that BMG can effectively target shoppers at the prime moment of their shopper journey due to Boots’ rich loyalty scheme with over 17 million faithful customers. They added that deals and offers stir curiosity and act as an incentive to encourage brand discovery.
In summary, retail media builds brands. However, this research demonstrated that Boots Media plays a unique role within the retail media landscape—that of a Trusted Influencer.
Many congratulations to Boots Media Group and Boots UK! Thank you for inviting us to uncover this insight which demonstrated the enormous power that Boots has in building brands for manufacturer partners. Having a Boots retail media experience featuring a beauty brand made people twice as likely to say they would recommend that beauty brand to a friend as those who didn't have the experience. What a compelling advocate Boots is for its partner brands! Thanks to Mark Thompson Dana DiGregorio and team for their work on this.