Boots launched a new brand platform in September. It is called "Give it Some Boots," an integrated WPP team built it, and it arrived ten months after Charlotte Lock took over as chief marketing officer.
That timing is the story. Boots just happens to have a paper trail long enough to make it easy to see.
Here is the sequence, pieced together from fourteen years of trade coverage. In November 2012, marketing director Elizabeth Fagan retired "Here come the girls" and replaced it with "Let's feel good," launched with a Christmas spot during The X Factor. Fagan described the shift as moving from "Boots gets women" to inspiring women to do things that make them feel good. The feel-good idea carried on through Helen Normoyle's time running marketing. In 2021 Pete Markey replaced Normoyle, and Boots became "With you. For life." Lock replaced Markey in November 2025. Ten months later, a new platform.
Spencer Stuart's data puts the average S&P 500 chief marketing officer at 4.1 years in the job. Customers keep a much slower clock. Someone who started shopping at Boots in 2012 has since been handed three different ideas of what the store is for, and brand memory builds over a decade or more, which is longer than any of those ideas was allowed to run.
Be fair to the people in the chair. A new CMO inherits a platform somebody else chose, gets measured on growth inside a window shorter than the platform's payback period, and is surrounded by agencies who know the fastest way to show impact is a launch. Nobody in that sequence acted stupidly. "Here come the girls" was a great piece of work that had probably done its job by 2012, and "Give it Some Boots" may turn out to be the best of the four. Nobody outside Boots has seen the briefs, and pretending the new work is bad without them would be cheap.
My own hands are not clean here. Over thirty years I have pitched new platforms to new marketing leaders who wanted a visible first win, and I took the fee. Some of those platforms were better than what they replaced. A few were just newer, and at the time I could not always tell which was which.
The fault sits in the org chart. Positioning lives inside the marketing department, so it turns over when the marketing department turns over. A brand that wants a position longer than 4.1 years has to park it somewhere the next CMO cannot rewrite alone: with the CEO, with the board, in a written document that separates the fixed idea from its current expression.
The practical version takes an hour. Write down the one sentence your brand would still say if the entire marketing team left tomorrow. Then write down who has the authority to change that sentence. If the honest answer to the second question is "whoever we hire next," start budgeting for the next relaunch now, because it is already on the calendar whether anyone has scheduled it or not.
A positioning that changes when the org chart changes was a campaign all along.