Post on 21-Apr-2018
transcript
December 7, 2014
The Digitalization
Road of Burberry
Abstract
With the development of internet, the world is becoming unprecedented connected. In 2014, there are over
three billion global internet users and the number is still increasing in a pace of 10% growth every year.
Among the users, 1.3 billion are active Facebook users and 31 million have a twitter account. Business men
with visionary mindset are taking advantage of the opportunity to dig gold in the online world. And
traditional businesses also try to expand themselves into the e-commerce field to meet the consumer shift in
a more efficient way. While in luxury field, most brand were holding doubtful attitude towards
digitalization since the industry always has the most prestige image and highly focuses on the exclusivity of
both brand and consumer experience. Burberry, the previous royal brand, who used to serve the upper class
with 158 years history, became the early player in the trend of digitalization among luxury brands. The
movement leaded the brand to boosting growth but also brought up questions to the industry: Should luxury
brands go to digital? How to keep the luxurious image while going into the mess media? Will it change the
traditional way of luxury brands doing business? What the brand can benefit from digitalization?
Key words
Luxury brand, Digitalization, E-commerce, Technology, Digital marketing, Social network, Content,
Consumer Engagement, Offline, Online, Consumer experience
Group6
ZHANG Meng
B00470981
1
Introduction
During 2011 London Fashion Week, 2 days before the online streaming show of Burberry Prorsum
2011 A/W. All the staff was busy preparing one of the biggest events of the year, especially for Christopher
Bailey, the Chief Creative Officer of Burberry. He got up early with a real-time tweet sharing with all the
early birds who were just like him, “Morning! Hazey but beautiful morning here in London, everything is
coming together CB”.
The following day, dozens of super models rushed into Horseferry House, the Burberry’s headquarter in
London, for the fitting before the big show. Christopher stepped out of his office, watching girls coming in.
He took out his Iphone and tweeted: Girls coming in for fittings....CB, with a photo of the view from up-
floor enclosing below the simple line, then turned back into office and continued to focus on his work.
“Today is the day”, after the whole night non-stop working, Christopher Bailey, the Chief Creative Officer
of Burberry, grabbed his Iphone beside the piles of invitations and tweeted a greeting for the followers of
the brand. “It’s showtime CB” he typed with slight excitement. And he didn’t forget to send a short clip on
Weibo, known as Chinese Twitter, to remind the Chinese audience to watch the show online. Few hours
later, when the models were descending in the rain capes and Baker-boy caps with the magical snow falling
down on the catwalk, the front row VIPs and the global audience who was witnessing the entire events
through the Internet were amazed by this fashion feast for sensory.
After the show curtains down in the applause of audience, models, makeup artists, designers and people
who were putting effort to this show were celebrating, taking photos and talking to each other in the back
stage, while Christopher started thinking, “what should I explore next?”
Brand Background
The Early Year
In 1856, the brand was founded by the 21-year-old draper’s apprentice Thomas Burberry, with the first
store located in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. He invented a hardwearing, water-resistant yet
breathable fabric--Gabardine, which won the popularity in making military uniforms and raincoats in late
19th century. In 1895, Tielocken was introduced, which become the well-known Burberry trench coat later
and Tielocken was patented in 1912. In early 20th
century, Burberry opened its first store in Paris at 8
Boulevard Malesherbes.
In the early year of Burberry, the famous explorers and aviators, such as Major F.G. Jackson who is famed
for mapping parts of the Arctic Circle and aviator Claude Grahame-White who is the first person to fly
between London and Manchester in less than 24 hours, are the endorsement of the brand. The quality and
functionality of the coat from Burberry acted as key roles in those expedition stories. In 1911, Burberry
provided Roald Amundsen and his team clothes and tents, who later become the first people to reach the
South Pole. [Exhibit1]
During World War I, Burberry was commissioned to adapt the officer’s coats to suit the warfare by
bringing trench coat, which became a popular iconic item of the brand. The coat closes with a single strap
and buckle fastening and only features a button at the collar [Exhibit2]. The brand signature, Burberry
Check [Exhibit3], was created and used as the lining in trench coats in the 1920s. Another symbolic image
of Burberry is the Equestrian Knight logo of the brand, from the original version of the black and orange
2
logo which is created in 1933, now the brand logo has evolved into the well-recognized version, carrying
the 158 years brand history and heritage. [Exhibit4].
The Late 20th
Century
1970s, Burberry started to expand the brand to US market. First store was showed up in 57th East Avenue
in New York. In the following year, retails stores presented widely in US map, including big cities such as
San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington.
In the late 20th
century, following the lead of former CEO Rose Marie Bravo, Burberry started to leverage
its powerful brand recognition to extend the reach to new and expanded customer segments. The brand
succeeded in moving to mass market through licensing. With the joining of Roberto Menichetti as chief
creative officer, photographer Mario Testino and supermodels Stella Tennant and Kate Moss, the
conservative classic British brand was injected with modern blood. [Exhibit5]
The 21st Century
Entering into 21st century, the pace of Burberry expanding globally was accelerated. The global flagship
store was opened in Bond Street, London in September 2000 while the flagship in Los Angeles was finally
situated in the famous Beverly Hills. In 2001, Christopher Bailey joined Burberry as the leader designer,
then, became the chief creative officer six years later. Burberry came to public in 2005, after the former
major shareholder, GUS plc, distributed its Burberry holding directly to GUS shareholders through a
demerger progress.
Recommended by Christopher Bailey, Angela Ahrendts started to re-brand Burberry as the brand new CEO
in 2006 by using high-tech methods. Sharing the common vision, Angela and Christopher transformed the
158 years-old brand into a pioneer in digital field by targeting on millennial consumers. The digitalization
of Burberry brought a triple growth to the brand in the past 8 years. In the financial year of 2013-2014,
Burberry hit the turnover of over 2 billion for the very first time with 20% profit before tax [Exhibit 6]. In
April 2014, Angela Ahrendts stepped down as CEO and joined Apple in the same year. Christopher Bailey
took over her position, acting as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Director at the same time.
Business Model and Performance
Currently, Burberry’s main businesses include women’s and men’s apparel, children’s wear, accessories
and beauty product [Exhibit 7]. Within the apparel categories, three diversified brands build up a pyramid
targeting the different levels of consumer. Burberry Prorsum presents the most fashion collection from
runway shows, providing the design inspiration for the brand and contributing 5% of the total revenue.
Burberry London, a tailored collection that brings 45% of total income, offers the daily wears for weekdays
of working people. Burberry Brit is a collection for casual wears with generating 50% turnover in total.
The distribution network includes both online and offline. The brand owns 497 directly operated stores in
32 countries which contributed 70% of total sales [Exhibit 8], 70 franchises store in an additional 28
countries and 1400 wholesales department and specialty stores in over 80 countries. The digital platform,
burberry.com, is actively serving for communicating with its customers in 11 languages and providing
various products ranges for selling online.
3
The Luxury Industry towards Digitalization
Around 2008, most luxury brands were holding doubts to all the digital things. It made sense. Digital
means discretization which is contrary to what luxury brands are holding through their history, that is,
exclusivity. Luxury brands always shut its door to those who couldn’t afford and serve to those who were
able to pay for the exceptional product and experience of the brands. Most important, the digitalization is
an emerging field, no one knows what consequences it will bring or whether the brand will benefit or lose.
When facing the digitalization trend, some of the brands stayed in the comfort zone and refused to change
due to the lack of visionary while some chose to take the opportunity and see where it can take the brand to.
Few years later, the trends of digitalization remarkably shifted the world. When everyone was connected by
web2.0, people started to shell out big money on online shopping and life was influenced by the internet,
more and more luxury brands felt the urgency of implementing digitalization in their business. It was not
simply re-allocating the advertisement budget into social media marketing. “There is a sense of urgency
associated with digital platforms,” Vera Wang president Mario Grauso said. “We haven’t so much shifted
[advertising] resources, but rather we have allocated additional resources to build, support, and promote our
social media platforms.”1 Brands begin to consider digitalization as way to innovate the luxury brand in a
strategic level.
In consequence, there is a huge gap between brands in terms of the digitalization level in luxury industry
since brands attached different importance and involvement into the digital strategy. The early players,
including Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Diane von Furstenberg got into digital since 2009, explored the
digital implementation for the industry. Then, brands, like Hermes Chanel and Givenchy, started following
the pioneers, somehow more like being pushed into the digitalization trend. It seems that brands are doing
the similar things, building social network account, streaming fashion show online and promoting digital
campaign online. However, the results and return have huge difference among brands. Burberry excels in
strategic e-commerce reach, with online sales across all product categories available in a wide array of
countries and languages while Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Tiffany surpassed the British luxury brand in
terms of user experience.2
For the luxury conglomerate, the inconsistency of the digitalization also exists, which is hugely caused by
the brand positioning and the decentralized management. Take LVMH, Louis Vuitton shows an ambitious
in enhancing brand digitalization while Céline still takes no action. Interestingly, the Creative Director
Phoebe Philo once expressed her personal opinion towards social network “I'd rather walk down the street
naked than join Facebook”. On the contrary to LVMH, Kering group has a consistent strategy. The joint
venture established with Yoox in August 2012, brought impressive revenue to Kering’s smaller and mid-
sized fashion brands, such as Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, while Gucci still kept
developing its digital strategy autonomously.
However, for the majority of the brand, digitalization is still an on-going project. In fact, it can’t be finished
as long as the internet the world is changing all the time. Currently, most of the brands are working mainly
in social networking, online content producing and combining the online and offline campaigns. Brands,
such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Burberry, attempt to build unique online culture and nurture a bunch of
brand lovers, which are the potential target in future. Only small amount of brands can go beyond the
existing implementation and explore more possibilities. Burberry is definitely one of those pioneer brands.
1 Is Digital Killing the Luxury Brand? By John Ortved, 12
th September, 2011
2 From the Business of Fashion, Burberry Remains Digital Luxury Leader, While Céline Trails Industry by
Vikram Alexei Kansara 9th
October, 2014
4
The Digitalization of Burberry
"That's something that I think as a creative brand and a creative organization it's a very seductive
place to play." - Christopher Bailey
Stuck with the underperforming problem, Burberry was having a hard time with less than 4% growth rate
in 2006. The increasing competition from French and Italian luxury brand made the situation even fierce
when more marketing budget was allocated by those competitors. At the same time, the classic trench coat
was not taken as the core product while various product coming out and diluting the brand heritage. The
inconsistency of the brand strategy and its heritage led to a blurred brand positioning in the market without
clear targeting group. Then how to transfer a conservative British brand into a brand that the age needs
became the priority that Burberry needed to deal with. Burberry was drove to re-think about the customer
segment and, eventually, the company decided to turn to millennial consumers, who are in their 20s and
much more positive to embrace the change of the world. The younger target group is definitely the most
Internet active group, comparing to the older generation. The urgent need for linking these young people to
the brand motivated Burberry to adopt digital strategy.
Internal Management Digitalization
Burberry integrated IT department with all the other departments, especially marketing department. The
Chief Technology Officer and IT people were challenged to go beyond what they have been doing so that
they would be driven to implement new-tech to make other departments’ envision come to life. Meantime,
Burberry created totally new departments, including a social media department, a mobile department and
an insight & analytics department, and brought new management (SVP of Customer Insight) inside the
group, which created an instant buy-in from the new department. 3 Also, management board and employees
could communicate regularly through an internal platform-Burberry Chat. From the Christopher Bailey in
headquarter in London to the sales assistant of retail stores in Beijing, people of the company were
connected globally to get better informed with every movement of the brand, which is the first step of
nurturing digital mind of the entire organization.
Interactive Marketing Campaigns
Since 2009, Burberry has been pushing the boundary of digitalization way further than the public expected,
especially when it comes to the various marketing campaign integrated with all kinds of the latest
technology and creative concept. As Christopher Bailey considered, “It’s not only about the product, it
should be inspiring people. That’s why we have multi-platform”, Burberry implemented few remarkable
marketing campaigns in the past 5 years.
Art of Trench
In 2009, Burberry launched the Art of Trench, an individual social-networking website for the brand to
spread the trench coat culture on a social-networking base. Trench coat lovers could snap and post their
trench coat looks on the website. Participants are also allowed to vote and comment on other people’s
shared photos. The entire campaign was built on user-generated content and enhanced participants’
enthusiasm to get involved with brand and its culture. Even Christopher is marveled by the inspirations of
trends and styles showed in tons of post from the brand followers, “I look at the site for ideas” he said.
Most important of all, the Art of Trench resulted in the direct responds of the viewers to the items they are
interested in and triggered click-through behavior that leading the target consumer to the brand online store.
3 Digital transformation of Burberry by Saloni Sahni, 30
th April , 2014
5
3D Fashion Show
In 2010, the 3D show of Burberry turned out to be the absolute spotlight in A/W 2010 London Fashion
Week. With the unprecedented Avatar still shaking the world, Burberry was inspired by the 3D movie
technique, thus, integrated the cutting edge technology into a live fashion for the very first time. The
Burberry show was beamed to 5 main cities (New York, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo and LA), “3D technology will
bring our global audience into the London show space allowing them to see the colors and fabrics, to hear
the music and to be a part of that moment when it all finally comes together.” as described by Christopher
Bailey4.
Meanwhile, the show was live streamed in 2D to live.burberry.com where audience could comment in real
time by connecting to their Facebook and Twitter account while watching the show [Exhibit 9]. The show
was streamed to 73 media websites, including Vogue, Grazia and CNN.
The wide online distribution brought over 100 million audience to the show, the event jumped into the top
ten hot topic in Twitter while the show was going on, which is never been achieved by any of the luxury
brand in a fashion show. “It requires guts and audaciousness to attempt and achieve something no brand
has done before. For this, Burberry deserves much kudos.” The Business of Fashion commented.
Burberry Acoustics
Burberry Acoustic is an original music platform that sponsoring the emerging artists and bands to share
their music videos [Exhibit 10]. As a designer, Christopher Bailey also shows his enthusiasm to music,
which in result made Burberry Acoustic an important part of brand culture and showcased “young British
bands that Burberry believes in”.5 With the high quality music, Burberry earned load of positive feedbacks
from the Burberry Acoustic users, which generate a higher engagement to the brand since people linked the
music with the collections, design and the culture of Burberry. "The average person is on Burberry.com for
7.8 minutes," but on its music site, Burberry Acoustic, "they stay for 18 minutes" Ahrendts revealed. The
success of Burberry Acoustic, resulting in a common recognition of the brand culture from its target
consumer, has a positive impact on promoting Burberry’s product and its collection.
Burberry Kisses
Powered by the Google technology, Burberry Kisses was launched in 2013 on http://kisses.burberry.com.
The inspiration was simple, "you send one of your personal kisses to anyone, anywhere in the world, and
you follow the journey of your kiss" as introduced by Christopher Bailey. But the design and the
technology behind the campaign was the real power that attracts visitors from 215 countries spent an
average of 3.5 minutes to send a digital kiss to their loved one by using the webcam of any Internet
connected portable device [Exhibit 11]. As users see their digital letter sealed with a kiss and start travel to
the destination on a 3D landscape, they will also get to see the local landmarks and street view images
reflected into puddles, which bringing a totally new experience of posting a mail. The campaign captured
headlines worldwide as the #burberrykisses tag spread across social media channels.6
The aim of the Burberry Kisses is to build a connection between the millennial and Burberry Beauty line
while providing a highly interactive, entertained and personal digital experience to boost the engagement of
targets customers. Combined with the online campaign, the Burberry Kisses also went offline afterwards.
4 Burberry 3D Live Stream by Imran Amed 25
th February, 2010
5 Burberry engage consumers with acoustic music project and fashion collections by Andy Pilkington on
20th
October 2010 6 http://www.artcopycode.com/campaign/burberry
6
The campaign was continued and redesigned for Valentine's Day and Holiday in the retail stores in United
States. It also became the theme of the Burberry's flagship store opening in Shanghai. [Exhibit 12]
The Early Adopter on Social Media
Since 2009, Burberry stepped into the world of social media when the other luxury brands were still
debating the entrance. Now, the brand presents itself widely and successfully in social network websites,
which include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Google+, Pinterest and SinaWeibo, with a
consistent visual image updating with new collection and lasted launching campaigns. The connection
between each social media is strong that users can easily approach to the brand just through a click with a
multi-sensory experience by words, pictures, music and videos.
When the brand first came to Facebook in 2009, Burberry was friended by one million users in the first
year, then reached two millions in the next half year and achieved three million followers in just one month
later. Now the brand already has 17.9 million fans on the platform. Burberry Facebook account is the hub
of latest information of the brand with abundant multi-media resources. Once liked the Burberry page,
users will get new feeds every now and then on their personal pages along with the real time feeds from
their families, friends and colleagues. The contents are more focusing on promoting new products,
campaigns and events in an official way. [Exhibit 13]
Burberry Twitter account (@Burberry) was opened in 2009, owning 3.39 million followers
currently.[Exhibit14] The main contents include photos and videos of new collection or campaigns,
celebrities in Burberry and messages from Christopher Bailey. The entire brand home page in the platform
shows a consistent visual impression as the brand official website, very Burberry. Most of the tweets are
short updates, enclosed with graphics or video clips, containing the latest information from the collection or
the offline event, from Burberry acoustic or from the art of the trench. And Christopher Bailey plays an
important role in managing the account. He usually tweets in person with an affix CB in the end of his short
updates. His words leave an approachable impression to the followers, which shorten the distance between
the brand and its target audience.
Other than the main account (@Burberry), the brand also owns 11 international accounts, including
Burberry Middle East or Burberry France, which are operated in different languages. On top of that,
@BurberryService, the official customer service account, aims at providing 24/7 online customer services,
however, @BurberryService is the least active among the brand’s accounts with just around 4000 followers
in total.
SinaWeibo
Sina Weibo is a microblog platform that has the same function and structure as twitter, which is popular
among Chinese users. Since Twitter is blocked in China, the brand adopted Sina Weibo to reach Chinese
consumers. Entering in 2011, the brand account (http://weibo.com/burberry) already got followed by over
900,000 users [Exhibit 15]. The mainly contents are consistent with Burberry Twitter account in terms of
promoting the new collections and campaigns and the posts from Christopher Bailey. Additionally,
Burberry adds more localized informations in order to communicate with Chinese users, for instance, the
photos of Chinese celebrities and model and local retail stores opening information, the posts from
Christopher Bailey will be also synced and translated into Chinese version and the special greetings from
the brand to the Chinese festivals. Unlike Twitter account seldom interact with other, Sina Weibo Buberry
7
account is higher motivated to tag media account and celebrities’ account, in a result, attracting more
attention and higher presence in the platform.
Youtube
The Buberry Youtube channel has 441 videos available for audience with an over 51 million times total
views. Under the Burberry channel, there are 13 playlists which are categorized by campaigns, events,
product lines. The contents range from fashion shows to commercials to music and beauty tutorials. Among
of all the playlists, Burberry Acoustic playlist has the most videos, which are counted almost 20% of the
videos. The lasted video“From London with Love”, a festive music film starred by Romeo Beckham was
played by 8,113,083 times just after being published for one month, which tells a story of a young couple
falling in love, against a theatrical backdrop of London.7 The video was fine made with fantastic scene
design and amazing music, the most important of all, the appearance of Romeo Beckham drew tons of
attention from the public. Although, only 5 videos reached million views, among which are three
promoting videos and two music clips from Burberry Acoustic. [Exhibit 16]
Fine toned pictures are everything on Burberry Instagram account. With nearly 1400 photos posted on
Instagram, the brand gained 2.3 million followers who enjoy the visual feeds from Burberry. Unlike the
brand other social media website, Burberry is more causal on Instagram when sharing the funny moment
from backstage of the events, the street snap of trench coat lovers or a simply a pretty view from the
window of the headquarter, Horseferry House.[Exhibit 17]. Instagram humanized the brand into a young
British man through its feeds, aesthetic and vivid with full of spirit.
After the release of the latest video campaign “From London with Love” on Youtube, audience are
discussing about the video in the comment. A user named Deborah Blacoe, wrote “I can't afford their
products, but I adore everything about this Burberry advertisement. I particularly like the casting of Romeo
Beckham as a kind of 'Peter Pan' style character. He has a lovely twinkle in his eye and adds a lightness to
something which could take itself too seriously. Beautifully directed.” It’s obviously that the content that
Burberry generated online and all the technology trials the brand did won a huge amount of lovers of the
brand. However, is the brand talking to the right target who will eventually purchase the thousand euros
trench coat? If it’s not, then why Burberry spared no effort in maintaining the social media platforms?
Innovative Shopping Experience
“It’s about an experience as well as buying a product. And I think what we’ve found is the more
we entertain, the more we allow people into our brand. Then maybe one day they’ll buy. And
then . . . who knows?”
-Christopher Bailey
Beside the persistent online strategy of the brand, a digital revolution is happening offline in Burberry’s
retail store as well. The Burberry flagship store in 121 Regent Street, London is the largest brand retail
store, a building covering four floors with 260 employees working inside. Equipped with a 22ft high screen,
500 hidden speakers and a hydraulic stage, the London flagship became the most digital integrated retail
store in the world after the renovation in 2012. However, the most advanced technology implemented into
the store was the RFID8 microchips. When consumers putting on the items approach to the “Magic Mirror”
7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojBufhpPgMo&list=PL1FB6A6DFB3440DBB
8 Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the
purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects.
8
inside the outlet, the mirror transforms into a screen that shows a film of how the garment was made and
what it looked on the catwalk.9[Exhibition18] “It’s a store of real contradictions. A very big imposing space,
but we’ve tried to make it very small, welcoming and intimate,” Christopher Bailey explained. On top of
that, plenty of Ipad devices are provided to customers to browse through the product, to watch the video of
the garment presented on models and to read the buyers feedback on the item they are interested in while
sitting cozily on the couches. Each sales assistant will hold one Ipad for quick checking the stock and
connect with other sales people, which enhance the serving efficiency in such a huge building. Even the
purchasing process can be finished on Ipad instead of lining to check out at a register.
Burberry is also pursuing the innovation combined offline service with online platform to improve the
consumers shopping experience. By adopting the smart mobile technology, Burberry extended the
personalization experience beyond tradition when promoting the 2013 A/W collection. Burberry’s Smart
Personalization is a customized service, offering tailored outwear and custom bags with engraved
personalized nameplates containing with built-in technology. The technology enables customers to unlock
the video clip which tracks back the production process and craftsmanship of the product on mobile devices.
Additionally, the chip inside the nameplates can also be activated on the large-scale mirror in at London
Flagship store on Regent Street. [Exhibit19]
Before consumers wouldn’t expect that they could achieve a purchase of the items that they fell in love
with right after the fashion show. However, Burberry brought this idea come to life in 2014 Burberry
Prorsum Menswear A/W fashion show. Consumers were able to “Shop the Runway” following the brand’s
London Fashion Week show on 8th
January and the collection will be available through 22nd
January. By
shortening the time between collection presentation and commerce, Burberry is able to give consumers a
unique experience of owning an item long before it hits store shelves.10
“Its ‘shop the runway’ feature
encourages impulsive purchase at the moment of first exposure, when items still carry the novelty tag,” said
Yuli Ziv, founder/CEO of Style Coalition, New York. On both the official website and the social media
platforms, people could always find the “Shop” link for encouraging further purchasing when watching the
show. Through the link, users were led to the brand official website where they could find the fashion show
video and the product information for each item that wearing by models in the catwalk. By doing so, the
time gap between the seasonal presentations of the brand and the shopping process is largely reduced,
bringing higher motivation to consumers’ purchasing.
The Next: Ecommerce?
It’s not for people to find out that majority brands are actively promoting themselves online but when it
comes to e-commerce, brands are still holding a cautious attitude. When browsing the brand official
website, customers have fully access to watch the catwalk video, going through all the pictures of latest
collections. However, consumers will be always disappointed to find they are not able to buy any products,
either in Chanel.com or in Dior.com. With the exception of a few brands, such as Saint Laurent, Gucci and
Burberry, the last of which takes online orders directly after its fashion show, the rest of the industry still
steps out the e-commerce field.
Unlike Louis Vuitton just has limited product categories available to be purchased online, Burberry is
providing its full scope of products under three brands, Burberry Prorsum, Burberry London and Burberry
Brit, on its official website now. The products offer on burberry.com ranges from garment for woman, man
and kid, leather goods, accessories to cosmetics. The customized scarves service is available as well. In the
9 Magic mirrors, 25 staircases and a giant 22ft screen - Burberry flagship store lands in Regent Street by
Karen Dacre and Rosamund Urwin, 13th
September 2012 10
Burberry delivers faster fashion with ecommerce feature by Sarah Jones, 9th
January, 2014
9
first half of 2014, retail revenue rose by 14%, which is largely contributed by digital sales. Digital sales of
orders via iPads in store counted over 25% while “order online, collect in store” counted 20% of the growth.
Meantime, the brand is trying to extend its online shopping channel to Amazon and Tmall. In April 2014,
Burberry teamed up with the most powerful e-commerce group, Alibaba, opening official online store on
one of its platform Tmall11
and aiming in emerging Chinese online shopping market. This is a milestone
since this is the Chinese shoppers bought $295 billion worth of merchandise online in 2013, and could buy
as much as $713 billion worth in 2017, estimates data tracker iResearch Global Inc.12
“Many consumers
have already bought luxury goods over the site—often through resellers—showing that there is demand for
the products.” pointed out by Janet Wang, Tmall's international business development director. The
entering in Tmall of Burberry, on one hand, meets the need of Chinese consumers shopping culture, on the
other hand takes more control of the brand sales online in Chinese market due to the online grey market and
counterfeit situation which are harmful to both brand image and turnover.
Just two month ago, during the S/S 2015 London Fashion Week, Burberry cooperated with Twitter,
introducing the in-tweet purchasing for its nail-polishing product during the fashion show. Soon, consumers
will be able to buy, the brand new women’s fragrance, My Burberry through in-tweet purchasing as well.
11
Tmall is an e-commerce platform for brands and companies selling authentic and quality product,
sometimes with a price advantage comparing to physical market. 12
Burberry Opens Online Store on Alibaba's Tmall by Laurie Burkitt in Shanghai and Kathy Chu in
Hong Kong, April 24th
, 2014
10
Exhibit
Exhibit1: Roald Amundsen and his team in South Pole in 1911.
Source:Internet
Exhibit2: Burberry trench coat was popular among officers
Source:http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/history_burberry_trench_coat_1918
11
Exhibit 3:The signature Burberry Check
Source: Internet
Exhibit 4: Burberry logo in 1933 and current logo
Source: http://fr.burberry.com/
Exhibit 5: The Burberry Autumn/Winter 1999 Campaign featuring British model Kate Moss,photographed
by Mario Testino.
Source: Internet
12
Exhibit 6: Turnover of Burberry from financial year 2004-2014 (million£)
Source: Burberry Annual Financial Report
Exhibit 7: Revenue by product division
Source: Burberry Annual Financial Report 2013-2014
13
Exhibit 8: Regional performance in 2013-2014
Source: Burberry Annual Financial Report 2013-2014
Exhibit 9: 2010 A/W Show, live streaming on live.burberry.com
Source: Internet
14
Exhibit 10: Burberry Acoustic
Source: http://fr.burberry.com/acoustic#/acoustic
Exhibit 11: Burberry Kisses online campagin
Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRiZMVEIhas
15
Exhibit 12: Burberry Kisses offline campaign
Retail Window in US
Opening of flagship store in ShangHai
Source : http://www.artcopycode.com/campaign/burberry
16
Exhibit 13: Burberry on Facebook
Source: https://www.facebook.com/Burberry
17
Exhibit 14: Burberry on Twitter
Source:https://twitter.com/Burberry
18
Exhibit 15: Burberry on Sina Weibo
Source: http://www.weibo.com/burberry
19
Exhibit 16: Burberry on Youtube
Source:https://www.youtube.com/user/Burberry/videos?flow=grid&view=0&sort=p
20
Exhibit 17: Burberry on Instagram
Source:http://instagram.com/burberry
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Exhibit 18: Burberry flagship in Regent Street
Sources: Internet
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Exhibit 19: Smart Personalization
Video Burberry Introduces Smart Personalization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUD_ZPwiAvk
Personalized content
Video on mirrors at Regent Street store
Sources: http://www.luxurydaily.com/burberry-adds-personalization-digital-touchpoints-to-autumnwinter-
collection/