When Darren Milton was promoted to CMO in 2020, he knew it would take more than a killer campaign to fix the issues at the heart of Boundless. The 100-year-old membership club had been in decline for decades. Membership had hit a new low and brand awareness was sitting at a dismal 2%.
Darren had seen several marketing directors come and go before him, without ever getting to the root of the problem. But after embarking on MiniMBA training – and taking his team along with him – Darren was ready to get his hands dirty and take on the fundamental building blocks of strategic marketing: the 4Ps.
And he’s been sharing that transformation journey with us in a four-part case study series for MiniMBA.
First, we learned how Boundless rebuilt a product proposition that wasn’t serving its members anymore.
Now in part two, Darren shares how his team deployed the MiniMBA framework to build an IPA Award-winning campaign, which helped launch the biggest phase of new member growth in decades.
Key wins across the marketing mix include:
Between brand metric victories and picking up awards, Darren managed to squeeze in the MiniMBA hat trick, whilst putting his team through a mix of the Marketing and Brand Management courses.
The plan is to eventually get everyone trained across both, Darren says, but the impact of MiniMBA was immediate.
Before doing anything else, Boundless knew – and as Mark Ritson preaches – they needed to diagnose the brand before going anywhere near the 4Ps.
As we covered in part one, Darren and his team did some brand diagnosis work to get to the core of the Boundless brand: why they’re here and how they should be serving their members.
Now, Boundless was ready to embark on a hefty cycle of research together with creative and media partners Anything is Possible and research firm Trueology. This data would fuel the biggest marketing transformation in Boundless history, so they had to dig deep.
An initial qualitative wave explored themes that resonate with Boundless members, as well as core behaviours and motivations during their spare time. For example, who they spend it with, how much time they devote to active social leisure time each week, and how they plan it in advance.
This was followed by a quantitative wave of research to test these findings at scale. This work included a full segmentation, as well as profiling of those audiences to understand which segments the changes in Boundless’ proposition would most appeal to.
All in all, the research confirmed that the club’s 1923 founding mission – their Brand DNA – is as relevant as ever. People still want to switch off from work and enjoy their weekend with friends and loved ones.
Research also told them who they were really talking to – and it wasn’t the ‘everyday hero’ archetype.
Research told them who they were talking to – and it wasn’t the ‘everyday hero’ archetype
“Most people that work in the public sector don't tend to think of themselves as public sector workers. They work in IT at the school or they’re in HR at the local council,” says Darren.
“The idea that they’re this big homogeneous group that all think and act the same in one segment is nuts. They're as different from each other as they were from people outside the public sector.
“The thing they've got in common is that they give something back to society. When we dug into why people do the jobs they do, that was a common thread. They volunteer more than people that aren't in the public sector and they tend to give more of their time back.
“That’s a really nice trait and it’s something we try to pull out without being too over the top with it. But we didn't think it was our place to start giving praise and credit – that’s just who they were! And just like everybody else, they wanted to get away from work and switch off.
“What came out of our research is that switching off from work was super important. So, that's what we amped up.”
Boundless tapped directly into their audiences’ desire for fun and escapism to create a fantastical new universe for the brand. The award-winning ‘Time for Fun’ campaign launched in 2021 with a cast of weird and wonderful characters – and none of the typical category cues you’d expect...
Of all the great strides Darren and his team made – raising prices, improving product, the stuff of marketing dreams – the promotional P ended up being the thing Darren was most worried about getting past senior stakeholders.
They were taking to TV for the first time in 100 years. If Boundless was going to invest this way in long-term brand building, they had to be bold. Not ‘add some colour’ bold, but edge-of-your-seat, brand re-defining bold. They needed a sharp change in direction and, by that point, “the riskiest thing we could do is play it safe,” says Darren.
“Of everything I was asking for – budget-wise, partnerships, investment – the bit I was most nervous about was showing the board the TV ad.
“When we briefed our agency, we knew the objectives were quite punchy. They said to us: look, you need to punch above your weight … If we take the expected category approach, it's not going to work.”
If we take the expected category approach, it's not going to work
Darren had grown up in creative agencies, so he was quite comfortable with doing the unexpected. But for the governance board overseeing the legacy membership club, “this approach could have been considered a bit scary,” says Darren.
Many had come up through the club and been members for forty or fifty years. This would be a huge departure from anything they had ever done or seen in the (often quite serious) category.
To soften the landing, Darren brought them into the process as much as possible from the start. MiniMBA training gave him the language to explain not just what they were doing, but also the how and why.
To get the governing board on side with long-term brand building, he introduced them to the 95:5 Rule (only 5% of buyers are in-market at any given time).
It might have been born as a B2B rule, but 95:5 thinking is now generally accepted as a wholesale marketing axiom: most consumers aren’t ready to buy right now.
And, as Mark Ritson testifies, it’s one of the simplest and most effective ways to explain brand building to non-marketing stakeholders.
Pre-empting the usual cries for ‘more about the product’ and ‘more value,’ Darren took his board through the science of advertising effectiveness – i.e. long AND short – “trying not to be too marketing spiel-y about it,” he says.
“I created a simple visual illustrating the differences between performance and brand marketing,” says Darren.
“I took them through the journey of understanding that to build brand, you can't do all the rational functional stuff. That gets done at the responsive stage for the in-market consumers who are ready to buy. I explained that one is about creating future sales and one is about sales right now. And we have to measure them differently.
What we need to do now – the only thing we need to do – is stay in people’s minds
“What we need to do now – the only thing we need to do – is stay in people’s minds. And that means we need to be more emotional, because if it's more emotional, people are more likely to remember it.”
Clearly, Darren wasn’t talking about slow piano music and puppies. Emotive advertising means making audiences feel something. Any emotion – fear, surprise or, in Boundless’ case, joy – is proven to make ads more memorable and therefore effective by drawing viewers into your narrative.
But first, they needed to be noticed. Enter: dinosaur-riding pirates.
Darren presented his approach to the board as a three-pronged attack: “I said, the first thing the TV ad needs to do is get noticed. If it doesn't do that, we don't need to worry about anything else.
“The second thing it needs to do is be remembered. And the third thing, if we can get that far, is to be associated with these three things: public sector, great value and free time. That is the job of TV and that is how we're going to measure it.”
Darren was confident in the work he and his team had done. He knew they had followed the right strategic frameworks, brought the wider business on the journey with them, and everyone was now excited to release it into the wild and start seeing the marketing work.
But he still found himself slightly holding his breath as he showed the governing board the TV ad for the first time. “There were pirates!” he says. “In my world, it's not that wacky – I think we probably could have pushed it further – but in their world that was nuts.
“Bearing in mind I was also fairly new to the board. It's my first CMO role, they'd handed the reins over and the CEO was backing me, so I was nervous about that too. But they approved it. They didn't jump up and down about how good it was, but they didn't need to – they appreciated the story. The rational explanation as to why we're doing it and the science behind it.
“When you do that, it becomes quite difficult to argue with. And that's why you need to know your onions. You need to know your stuff.”
We know the commercial power of a great TV ad and campaign creative. We hear about it all the time in the marketing media. But these things need trained marketers, a great media agency partnership and proper investment to drive true advertising effectiveness.
For Boundless, the TV ad might be star of the show, but there was a whole ecosystem of incredibly smart, moving pieces working below the surface to integrate and amplify the Time for Fun campaign.
On top of the mass reach TV ad, Boundless also ran segment-specific brand campaigns. Here’s one for retirees, for example:
To reach teachers, they ran in-school media with JazzyMedia – placing targeted posters directly in the workplace. While outdoor Digital 6 sheets ran nationally, geo-located around schools and colleges.
Analysing each audience segment’s shape-of-day, they discovered unique rush hour and drive times – where key outdoor and radio placements are often underpriced.
Boundless also served persuasive, ‘buy now’ messaging to different audience segments across YouTube and Meta. And used LinkedIn to target audiences based on their professional status.
Taking things a step further still, once those wheels were in motion, Boundless used AI-enhanced proprietary software from Anything is Possible to continually monitor and optimise each element of the campaign.
All that is to say: Boundless was savvy with their media budget. They followed the fundamentals of marketing communications to the letter – long and short advertising, mass and targeted reach, multi-platform integrated campaigns, media neutrality – and then took advantage of advances in technology to maximise their budget, reach and overall effectiveness.
The results are loud and clear. Boundless wanted to punch above their weight. Well, they smashed through all of their communications objectives: boosting prompted brand awareness by +500% and share of search by +47% and proved greater price elasticity by continuing to grow new member sales after a rise in the membership fee.
From making brave strategic decisions to redefining the Boundless product, everything Darren’s team had done came to a head with the release of the Time for Fun campaign. It launched all guns blazing in 2021, bringing a huge surge in new member sales.
“There was a lot of buzz and energy internally,” Darren says. “It was probably one of the most exciting times we'd had here, because it affected everybody.”
After that initial post-campaign spike, the success story continued. New memberships kept growing, year one retention almost doubled and benefit usage is way up. The holistic value that Boundless gives its members is transformed.
Our agency said this could be IPA winnable … I always thought that was for big brands like McDonald’s
“It was our agency that said this could be IPA winnable” says Darren. “I always thought that was just for big brands like McDonald’s, so I knew we would be an underdog. But once we started pulling the deck together and looking at the data, the case was really compelling.”
In 2024, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the likes of BBC, H&M and HSBC, Boundless took home a bronze prize at the IPA Effectiveness Awards, recognising the incredible commercial success of Time for Fun.
Already, Darren and his team are focussed on how they can do better. As they work through phase two of marketing transformation at Boundless, they’re looking at raising the bar even higher on creative.
“We've had the TV ad running for four years now and although I'm aware that creative doesn’t ‘wear out’. I'm also aware that it's not ranking as high as it could on System1. So, we want to make the creative work harder.
“The challenge is how we evolve the TV ad. We created this really quirky universe but what we need to do now is bring a bit more emotion into it. So, there's a real creative challenge around the fluency – keeping that going – but increasing its emotive personality and characteristics.
“We've made so much progress with brand awareness, so we can't damage that, but we need to try and build on what we've got to cut through even more.”
This time though, from diagnosis all the way through to tactical execution, his whole team is “trained in the Ritson way – so it makes it a bit easier,” says Darren.
Cover: Boundless