Ruth Haffenden is Launching an In-House Studio and AI Model to Build Boody’s Brand

Boody is building an in-house content studio and rolling out an AI model for social media comments with a 99.9% accuracy rate, chief marketing officer Ruth Haffenden tells LBB, as part of a mission to increase brand awareness.

The B-Corp bamboo underwear and clothing company, founded in Australia, is “literally just building an in-house content studio in the office. We tried every content creation agency in town for that content. No one makes it in the way the team does. So we've hired an additional content creator [and we're] building our own studio space.”

Boody has always prioritised its customer experience, so “where do we automate and where do we not has been a really interesting conversation.” Ruth was “really sceptical” of introducing an AI model to answer comments on social media, “and so I set the benchmark of 99.9% accuracy so I cannot pick what is customer service and what is the AI. And it met it.”

Given the volume of social comments, “you actually have a customer waiting room in your comments section that you could easily convert into a sale,” she says.

The pilot program filters through comments and responds to those with a straightforward answer: pointing customers towards the right product or colour, and freeing up “real people to have real engagements” in the process.

“I spend my life trying to play ‘spot the robot’,” Ruth says. “The minute someone calls robot,” she’s ready to ditch it, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The big focus though, is “brand, brand, brand.” As Ruth explains it, “when people know what we're about, we're their brand of choice, so the top priority has to be, 'how do I make more people aware of Boody, and how do I do that in the most cost effective way?’” She says working that out alongside Boody’s creative agency partner, The Hallway, is “a beautiful creative challenge.”

“We've done such a good job on the rest of the funnel. Super tight, really good team in place on everything from CRM and loyalty to website experience and customer service. Our agencies are firing, the brand tracking is in place. 

“We've got very good at the performance piece. It's always going to keep the lights on. It always sweeps people up at the bottom.”

Ruth joined Boody in mid-2022. It’s her first client-side role. She joined from creative agency The Works, where she was managing partner for almost five years, and before that, launched and ran content agency Daresay, plus worked at media agency Mindshare in her native London. 

“The one bit I miss sometimes about agency is you will be given a brief ... rather than having to spin 50,000 different plates.” 

She says now she’s a CMO, she looks for respect and transparency from her agency partners. When she appointed The Hallway, she was also looking for a female creative lead.

“I don't think there's enough female creatives in the industry,” Ruth explains. “I think those that are [are often not] given the opportunities that they could be. So that was really important to me.”

She also wants transparency “about the people working on my account,” although given The Hallway is engaged campaign to campaign, versus on a retainer, she knows that team is subject to change.

“I very much appreciate the honest and open relationship I have with Jules [Hall, CEO] and Simon [Lee, CCO] at The Hallway. I would say to him, 'down tools, the board's not on board. And until that is happening, don't do anything else'.”

The day before the new platform, ‘Make Yourself Comfortable’ was set to launch late last year, it almost got killed. “It nearly got pulled the day before being dispatched, just because when you do have a small brand budget, it has to work, and it's completely understandable to go, 'should it be safer?'”

The work was built on the insight that 50% of women take their bra off the moment they get home. When Ruth spoke to The Hallway about that stat, “every female that worked on that campaign got it.” The brand had previously prioritised communicating its sustainability creds (a previous campaign was fronted by Jane Goodall) but the approach wasn’t leading to the brand awareness Boody needed, because customers don’t prioritise sustainability. Their priority list, in order, is “comfort, value for money, style, then sustainability,” Ruth says. 

While sustainability will always be baked into the business’ operations and decision-making, focusing on comfort was necessary to grow the brand. ‘Make Yourself Comfortable’ has a long life, Ruth assures, because it helps on the brand awareness front. The next step is expressing the platform “potentially in more of a light hearted way.”

The shift in creative direction, “was a very big, bold move, but we're also a very fun, relatable brand, and I think we want to inject a bit more of that personality.” Ruth is confident that ‘Make Yourself Comfortable’ is flexible enough to allow the brand and agency to do just that.

“The underwear industry has been doing a pretty shocking job of making women comfortable. So how do we surface more of those problems that we've got so used to, being a woman, just putting up with?

“It's still such a rich creative territory.”