MEDIA EVENT
	Company: Boots Retail USA Inc. Event: Boots U.S. Product Launch Objective: Introduce five product lines to key U.S. beauty editors from major publications. Strategy: Plan a tightly focused event that conveys key product information. Tactics: Choreograph small-group tours through five individual spaces, each themed to represent one product line. Results: Seventy of 75 targeted editors attended. Boots received editorial coverage in 20 media outlets — twice the goal of 10 mentions. Creative / Production Agency: Paint the Town Red, www.paintthetownred.net Budget: $112,900

hen you are launching an established brand in a different country, you spend money on advertising, advertising, and more advertising, right? Not when the company is 150-year-old leading European retailer Boots.

“If you meshed CVS and Sephora, that would be a Boots store,” explains Sandra Gabriele, public relations director at Boots Retail USA Inc. and a veteran of marketing at both Lancôme and Elizabeth Arden Departments Inc. “It’s an institution. Everybody in the U.K. knows the company. There’s a store on every corner.”

But in the United States, as recently as 2006, the Boots brand was a virtual unknown. Having conquered its homeland, the company was ready to expand into the enormous American market. However, opening stand-alone stores — the usual route for an established retailer — would have been outrageously expensive not only in real estate, but also in terms of the ad and marketing spend required to get the word out.

With that option off the table, the company looked for a faster path. Boots has an extensive line of proprietary cosmetic and personal care products, so rather than focus on Boots as a store, it opted to focus on Boots as a brand, and bring only its proprietary lines to the American market. So in 2006, the company struck a deal with Target Corp. to begin selling some of its lines in Target’s 1,500 U.S. stores, beginning in April 2007. “You certainly couldn’t open up 1,500 of your own stores in one year,” Gabriele acknowledges. Pairing the venerable British brand with Target, which already had a sophisticated retail infrastructure, could mean fast presence and fast U.S. profits for Boots. But there was a problem. Gabriele joined Boots in December of 2006 to spearhead the U.S. launch, and the Target rollout was just four months away.

Gabriele knew that there was no time to create an all-out ad campaign and launch it soon enough to get a palpable effect, even if she could wrangle a budget large enough to fund a serious media blitz. But a launch event with the right beauty editors in attendance, reasoned Gabriele, could generate significant buzz by the time Boots’ products hit Target shelves — but only if there was enough lead time for the press to react.

Magazine editors typically work with about two to three months of lead time. So Boots would need to host an event by Feb. 1 for stories to be ready to run in April magazine editions. That meant Boots had only 20 business days to concept, develop, and execute an event that would introduce influential editors to the product lines that would soon appear at Target stores across America. And, given the notoriously packed agendas of beauty editors, Gabriele knew the event had to be appealing enough to make their date books, short enough to respect their time, informational enough to meet their clip needs, and flawless enough to elicit the appropriate brand impression.

THE RIGHT WHITE SPACE

From her history working with Manhattan-based fashion and beauty editors, Gabriele already knew how she wanted the event to unfold, and who she wanted to invite. So she turned to job one: Find the right space. Fast. This is New York, after all, where simply getting a table for dinner can require two months advanced notice.

Gabriele and her event-planning firm, New York-based Paint the Town Red (now part of Madrid-based Global Events ID Corp., S.L.), had two primary criteria for their event environment:

1. It had to be convenient for the editors, whose native habitat centers around midtown Manhattan.

2. It had to accommodate Gabriele’s vision for the event, which included not one key theme, but five: one for each of the brand lines soon to appear on Target shelves — Botanics, Mediterranean, Time Dimensions, Feel the Difference, and No. 7 skin care and cosmetics.

The event had to be appealing enough to make the date book, short enough to respect their time, informational enough to meet their clip needs, and flawless enough to elicit the appropriate brand impression.

Each line would have its own mini boutique and theme within the larger event venue, while a gathering and networking area would be dedicated to communicating Boots’ history. Editors would move through the themes, each represented as an environmental vignette, in intimate small groups, almost like a brand speed-dating session.

“Small groups are more intimate, more personal,” says Adam Sloyer, Paint the Town Red’s director of operations. “It’s more high touch, because there are fewer attendees per spokesperson.”

But to make it all work, Boots needed a blank canvas. “You can go to a restaurant or a formal banquet space, and you have to work not only to create your own atmosphere but to cover up the existing atmosphere of the place,” Sloyer says. “We weren’t going to find an event space in the city that could simultaneously showcase a Mediterranean feel and a botanical feel and a high-end cosmetics feel.” The eventual choice was Boylan Studios on West 26th Street and 11th Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. While not ideal — the space was farther from Midtown than the team would have liked, and its relatively small size (5,000 square feet) would make setting up Gabriele’s envisioned vignettes challenging — it was the best option given the available time. And that time was flying.

EDITORIAL APPEAL

To appeal to targeted editors, Gabriele strategically scheduled two separate event sessions to accommodate their varying schedules, with one group attending in the morning and a second in the afternoon.

Melissa Hobley, vice president of Boots’ U.S. public relations firm, Coburn Communications, had worked with the beauty industry for many years and had existing relationships with editors, as did Gabriele. So together they created a short, targeted list of 75 editors from their networks, including style setters from wellness titles, high-fashion juggernauts, lifestyle magazines, home-and-garden classics, and influential bloggers.

A few weeks before the event, Coburn reached out to the editors with a creative invitation, a messenger-delivered “passport to beauty,” which took the form of an airline ticket. Approximately one week after the printed invitations were mailed, Hobley and her team followed up with personal calls to the 75 editors on the short list, reminding them of the opportunity and focusing on the news value of this significant brand launch.

The day of the event, editors made their way to Boylan Studios for their tour appointments. As they arrived, they took elevators up to the space where they were greeted by a host in a lab coat, who ushered them into the first vignette — a detailed, old-fashioned apothecary setting — and placed them into the small groups with which they would move through the remaining vignettes. The apothecary environment was a fitting starting point, reminding attendees of Boots’ 150-year history, presence, and importance. “That’s our whole brand,” Gabriele says. “We’re built on a great heritage. It’s what separates us from other brands.”

Attendees spent about 15 minutes mingling, with food and beverages available (including bottled water custom labeled with the Boots logo). Then Gabriele and Boots CEO Martin Walters personally welcomed editors to the event with 15 minutes of opening remarks. All the while, the guests were surrounded by hundreds of Boots products on the apothecary’s shelves and dark-wood paneled counters, along with antique props — many from Boots’ own museum-like inventory — including pharmacy containers, display cases, cash registers, and mortars and pestles, all echoing the company’s beginnings as a series of drug stores.

After Walters’ greeting, double doors opened from the apothecary into a contrasting whitewashed space filled with white carpeting and drapes that provided a neutral backdrop for the five individual product vignettes.

As soon as the editors were assembled into groups, they proceeded on a 30-minute tour of the product vignettes, each with a short presentation by Boots’ U.K.-based representatives of the five product lines.

	As soon as the editors were assembled into groups, they proceeded on a 30-minute tour of the product vignettes, each with a short presentation by Boots’ U.K.-based representatives of the five product lines.

Each small (about 200-square-foot) vignette, defined by white drapes, held a table with products and props representing that particular cosmetic line’s theme. Colored carpet and a large foam-core-backed image of that line’s respective logo also emphasized the product’s brand identity and aesthetic.

To create the Botanics environment, Paint the Town Red filled the small space with plants and greenery, with a large straw ottoman as the product table surrounded by smaller rattan ottoman seats. Because Boots’ Mediterranean products use extracts of almonds, pistachios, avocados, and citrus fruit, a long wooden table held bowls of those ingredients in that vignette, along with an image of a vineyard. Time Dimensions, Boots’ anti-aging product line, featured a soothing white-leather sofa placed on raspberry carpet, with a vibrant floral arrangement and large hourglass on the table. The Feel the Difference vignette communicated a detoxification message, with an image of a woman bathing in a waterfall and square vases holding floating water lilies. The No. 7 line, which has both skin-care and cosmetics products, was featured in two vignettes, each similarly decorated and propped with contemporary black-suede sofas and contrasting carpet and throw pillows.

Each welcoming environment invited the editors in to sit, relax, examine the products, and talk to the representatives. Product representatives opened each brief visit with a five-minute overview of the featured line, then editors took one minute or so to pose brief questions to the reps. At the end of each six-minute period, jazz music played over a sound system to cue the small groups to move to their next product vignette.

Following the tightly choreographed tour, a brief question-and-answer period gave the group more time with the Boots executives. Then it was back downstairs with a hefty goody bag, including extensive Boots samples, to waiting cars ready to whisk the journalists back to their offices. Total editorial time away from the office: less than two hours, including transportation each way.

FLAWLESS RESULTS

“I wanted attendees to walk away with an understanding of who our experts are, what our products deliver, and the fact that we are there to service them and their readers,” Gabriele notes. But if the invited editors hadn’t shown up, the message, however well choreographed, would have fallen on deaf — or more accurately, absent — ears.

Fortunately for Boots, the event-day turnout astonished everyone involved. Of the 75 targeted editors, 70 attended, representing a range of marquee titles and influential blogs including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, and O: the Oprah Magazine. But the biggest measure of success was the more than 20 article placements — double the desired 10 mentions — that covered the newly introduced Boots product lines.

This year’s Corporate EVENT Awards judges praised Boots for its audience-appropriate scheduling and agenda strategies, and successful efforts to attract editors. “They exceeded all their objectives,” one judge said. “The press mentions generated via the launch event were in all the key publications. What’s more, the event was a good use of the company’s budget and produced a very sizeable outcome that advertising alone would have been unable to match.”e