The UK is facing a health crisis. Three prevalent conditions — high blood pressure, obesity, and joint/muscle pain — often go undiagnosed due to strains on the NHS and a regional health education gap. As the UK’s leading health retailer, Boots decided to support the NHS by launching a free in-store health check service. This would strengthen Boots’ role as a health destination in the UK and help it to live up to its ‘With you for life’ promise. Boots had two marketing and communications objectives: to create awareness of the new health check service and to educate audienceson the three health conditions.

At the outset, Boots decided to partner with a news brand as they needed a trusted source of educational content to meet campaign objectives. It chose Reach due to its extensive regional presence and diverse media mix across both print and digital.

Working with Reach, Boots conducted a YouGov survey that revealed significant regional variances in health behaviours and knowledge. This informed the campaign’s strategy, which would leverage its position as a trusted health brand to educate audiences through localised, real-life case studies and creative executions.

The content partnership with Reach included print advertorials, print display, VOD, and digital display. The localised print advertorials featured personal accounts of high blood pressure and weight related illnesses. Digital display ads ran in relevant health environments across Reach and in newsletters published by the Mirror and the Express.

Dynamic ads ran on Reach’s local information platform InYourArea, which pulled in the nearest Boots stores and offered users a health check. Personalised formats included an interactive map on mirror.co.uk informing readers about local BMI and blood pressure stats.

75,000 health checks were conducted at Boots during the campaign – up 76% versus pre-campaign. The campaign drove a 41% uplift in awareness of the Boots health check service and 14% uplift in agreeing they would turn to Boots if looking for support for a health problem, according to Reach brand lift study.

Econometrics from Ebiquity showed the print and content partnership activity drove the highest profit ROI of all the campaign’s media channels and had a knock-on effect on sales across other Boots categories. What is more, Boots data demonstrated 2,320 people who received the health check proved to require on-going monitoring, making this campaign potentially life-saving for these individuals.

Beyond the actual end results, it was the way they had made good use of the data analysis the whole way through, commissioning a bespoke YouGov survey not only to understand the behaviour of the nation as a whole but also what the regional disparities were.

Joanna Lawrence, EVP global agency development, Havas Media Network