From London to social media: the digital evolution of Burberry

When in 1997 Victor Barnett took the helm as president of Burberry, one of his first decisions was to hire Rose Marie Bravo as CEO with the intent of reorganizing the company and expanding the business impact of the brand image. But this corporate strategy resulted in an excessive dilution of the brand value due to a licensing policy that was too permissive. 

In 2006, it became apparent that the company had to win back its market positioning. Angela Ahrendts, the new CEO, decided to reverse course by implementing an innovative strategy. The biggest challenge ahead of her was to introduce the culture of the traditional trench coat with the target that the company had to reach to stay in business: young digital natives in new markets, in particular the US and China. To do so, Burberry decided to focus on digital.  
 

From that moment on, the history of Burberry and the brand’s British identity became the theme of captivating digital storytelling, perfectly suited to being shared on virtual platforms. The London fashion house was the first of the big players in the industry to experiment with customer engagement via social media and other platforms (especially YouTube). The videos shared with the digital public in those years were engaging and exciting; the objective was to put the brand’s British soul and its story center stage.  

In 2021 the company launched its first flagship store, brimming with sophisticated technology, in Regent Street in London. By the end of 2013, when Ahrendts left the company for a position at Apple, it was clear that Burberry had been moving in the right direction in terms of acquiring new customers in strategic global markets, but hadn’t yet seen satisfactory results. Ahrendts’ strategy was successful in reversing the deterioration of the brand’s prestige and stopping counterfeiting. But Burberry’s newly rediscovered identity, totally centered on London and the old British trench coat, did not seem to be attracting enough interest from the new targets. 

Then in 2016, Marco Gobbetti took over as Burberry’s new CEO, with the mission of winning new targets by reaching younger and less traditional markets, in particular in Asia and America. With this in mind, he did a drastic about face with the company, starting not from storytelling about the brand, but from the product itself. Even digital took on a new role, becoming a lever for transforming the entire business, not just brand communication. This radical revolution reached its peak with the arrival of Riccardo Tisci as creative director. He presented a new collection with a provocatively fresh style, and even a new logo. The new brand values were: exuberance, power, diversity, and pride. New celebrity endorsers were brought on board too: Marcus Rashford, Manchester United star, the rapper M Huncho and the singer Mahmood. 

In 2020, Burberry’s retail sales stalled in Europe due to Covid-19, but sales performance held steady in Asian markets, thanks also - and above all - to Gobbetti’s digital oriented strategy. In the first three months of 2021, the company closed at +86% on an annual basis, with £479 million in revenues. These numbers also reflected new projects, mainly in China, with which the company explored the potentialities of the social store, a retailing approach blending the physical and virtual (and social) dimensions of the shopping experience.  

Social media can be the heart of a company’s digital transformation – and business - going far beyond the borders of brand communication. From the beginning, for Burberry social media were also a form of social commerce. The company stepped up the use of these platforms so that their new targets could buy the collections presented via online streaming even before they appeared on the catwalks in Paris, Milan and London. Burberry played with the language of games, and automated services that were personalized via chat boxes, all in innovative ways.  

In addition to the digital strategy, Riccardo Tisci ideated collections and campaigns dedicated specifically to the Chinese market. The new social store opened in 2020 in Shengen was designed to inspire, entertain, and engage consumers thanks to flows of content from social media to the store and vice versa. Thanks to Burberry’s market performance in 2020 in Asia and America, the company won a place of prestige in the top ten ranking of luxury brands. Gobbetti left Burberry at the end of 2021, right when his strategy was showing business results that aligned with corporate objectives.