Boots has launched its third new brand positioning, slogan and campaign in five years, and the industry should treat that as evidence that marketing undervalues consistency.

The latest work, which launched last month under the slogan 'Give it some Boots', shows women at various stages of life defying biology to come out laughing, dancing and flaunting, helped by Boots beauty products and health services. The campaign runs to a remake of Nancy Sinatra's 1966 hit, 'These Boots Are Made For Walkin''. It includes a 73-year-old woman looking, as CMO Charlotte Lock puts it, "flipping gorgeous".

When Lock briefed WPP for the campaign, her instruction was trenchant: "Make me feel uncomfortable." That request reflects a real problem for mass, mainstream brands. Creative agencies, whether they admit it or not, practise a kind of triage on the briefs they receive, directing those they see as 'creative opportunities' to their strongest talent and those from midmarket brands to safer hands. For a brand with a 180-year presence on the high street, the work that comes back can suffer from an excess of respect. Lock asked for bigger and braver, and got it.

The work itself is hard to argue with: an all-positive depiction of the sprawling Boots customer offer and a four-syllable slogan in which one syllable is the brand name. It is intended to challenge established notions of female wellbeing. It would feel braver, though, if Dove hadn't arrived at similar territory 22 years ago. It reads as apt rather than unexpected.

The deeper problem sits behind the campaign. Lock arrived as customer and marketing director in November 2025, replacing Pete Markey, who had replaced Helen Normoyle in 2021. Normoyle positioned Boots as a wellbeing brand under the slogan 'Feel good'. Markey declared that merely feeling good had lost relevance and pursued a life-partner positioning under 'With you. For life'. Now Lock has launched a confidence positioning, invoking that word 'relevance' once again.

The dissonance is visible the moment a shopper visits a store. Smaller branches — the ones representative of most high streets — remain homely, familiar, unexciting and cramped, with the slogan 'Feel good', from two chief marketing officers ago, still emblazoned on the windows. Even the bigger, more enticing stores pull shoppers back down to earth with the encroachment of the sandwich section.

Compare this with the brands marketers themselves name when asked for examples of great brands: Nike, Red Bull, L'Oréal. Their slogans endure — 'Just do it' since 1988, 'Gives you wings' since 1987, 'You're worth it' since 1971 — and they come quickly to mind precisely because they are exceptions. Most brands succumb to periodic drift, redirection or cliff-face change as marketing leaders come and go.

Why do new CMOs feel the urge to change things when they arrive? The proximate answer: you can always find something in the data that makes the case for a sweeping new approach, even if the same data might support maintenance and refresh. A brave new positioning is immediately ownable for a new CMO. It gives heft to the CV, gets you talked about in the industry and adored by agencies, for whom 'maintenance' is a low-watt challenge.

The higher-order answer: new CMOs make these swingeing changes because they can. Brands without a clear and unequivocal centre of gravity — and Boots, built on long-superseded pharmacy foundations, is an ungainly, all-over-the-place offer spanning lipsticks, vegan wraps and shingles jabs — leave the most room for that power to be exercised.

Lock argues she has put her arms around all of it by celebrating the emotional feelings the brand inspires. There is sense in that. But emotional brand engagement is not the work of a moment, and it will not be achieved until there is greater cohesion between what the brand says and what it does. Operations could bring more excitement to smaller stores, or at least display the latest slogan; HR could support internal brand engagement.

Yet those discipline heads can hardly be blamed for sitting on their hands while contemplating the probability of another chief settling into the marketing hotseat and switching brand emphasis again. Lock, a star marketer with both Boots and John Lewis on her CV, may well move on to a more prestigious challenge. She would want her successor to continue her work — but that is what her predecessor wanted from her, and she self-evidently wasn't up for that.

If Boots keeps bringing in big marketing names and leaving them free to start from brand square one, the brand meaning will fissure under the weight of its own contradictions, and people will struggle to identify its role in their lives. WH Smith, once ubiquitous on the high street and now confined to transport hubs, shows where that road ends. One day those boots will walk right past the doors of a confused brand, even as their owners profess their affection for it.