Boots - Be Up Front Campaign, in association with Breast Cancer Care

As the UK’s leading health and beauty retailer, Boots' partnership with Breast Cancer Care is an opportunity for them to provide health information and advice around being ‘breast aware.’ This coupled with the fact that 83% of Boots customers and 79% of their staff are women, means that the partnership with Breast Cancer Care is based on a solid joint strategy.

Breast cancer awareness month during October is the ideal platform for Boots to combine both the communication of the ‘five point plan’ and cause related marketing activities. A number of beauty houses, such as Estee Lauder, along with Boots' own No7 launch special breast cancer products, donating proceeds from the sales of these to Breast Cancer Care.

Boots employees were encouraged to take part in fundraising activities through their local stores during October. All 600 stores that have No7 counters and an additional 100 stores without, where sent t-shirts, balloons and badges as well as show materials to publicise the partnership. Staff then spent at least 2,000 hours during the first week of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in supporting activities, raising five times more than they did in 2004.

2005 saw Boots launch the 41,000 faces campaign, based on the statistic that 41,000 people are newly diagnosed with breast cancer every year. The campaign wishes to capture this scale and invites anyone who has been touched by breast cancer to send in photos, culminating in the biggest ever online photographic exhibition that will be launched in Breast Cancer Awareness month 2006.