Burberry, a fashion brand that has pioneered the digital trends in luxury goods, continues to build success on its digital transformation efforts through social media.
“More widely, on social media our traction across Instagram and WeChat continued to improve, with growth in the number of followers and double-digit gains in the engagement rate per post compared to the previous quarter,” said Marco Gobbetti, CEO of Burberry.
Further, with aggressive press coverage and organic endorsement from influencers, the company succeeded in building more brand heat and shifting customer perceptions.
Some of the recent innovations include monthly B-Series drops and monogram capsule, which caught wider attention among millennial, especially in China.
Julie Brown, chief operating and financial officer, said, “In terms of e-commerce, the performance in digital has been led by China and we have seen strong double-digit growth through targeted innovation, like social gifting on WeChat.”
Burberry launched the WeChat mini-program on Chinese Valentine’s Day.
Further they continued the success in generating inspiration through the B Series and the monogram program in terms of exclusive product being available on Instagram and on WeChat.
Another innovation on the Chinese platform was the use of Douyin at the monogram challenge, which resulted in almost 1 billion views from users generating their own content.
Brown added, “In China the digital performance has been very strong equally across burberry.com and our third-party providers, so both have been performing extremely well.”
“In addition, key influencers continued to organically endorse Burberry product and our editorial ROI was higher than an already strong Q4,” Brown added.
In view of these efforts, Burberry received the Webby Award in April 2019 for the best social content within fashion and beauty segment.
The digital journey of Burberry dates back to 2006 when Angela Ahrendts, the then CEO, together with their chief creative officer Christopher Bailey, declared their vision to see Burberry as the first fully digital luxury company.
Since then, Burberry has adopted Digital as one of its strategic pillars supporting revenue growth. Their digital strategy goes like this, “Revolutionize our digital proposition, finding new and exciting ways to engage customers by displaying highly curated product assortments and personalized stories, and editorializing our website.”
The innovative approach to brand building and customer engagement was visible in their campaigns.
One of the most successful campaigns in their initial period was the ‘Art of the Trench,’ a unique customer engagement program where customers are encouraged to post photos of themselves wearing Burberry trench coats. The photos were featured on an exclusive website, and customers could share them on social media. It was estimated that by 2015, the campaign brought almost 25 million page views for the brand.
Burberry reported retail revenue of 498 million pounds for the quarter ended June 2019, a 4 percent growth compared to the same period previous year
