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.

Facebook

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]

Twitter

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]

Instagram

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

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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/