The Art of Trench

Burberry is a well- known, well-established luxury fashion brand which was founded in 1856. A while back Burberry decided to switch its marketing style from the conventional ways and moved toward more innovative ways by targeting the younger segment of people more than what they were known for doing. Burberry came up with a project known as The Art of Trench which is where they first started investing in the digital industry. They set up a photo sharing website where they would show people from all over the world wearing the iconic Burberry coats. They hired a photographer to travel and pursue this project while partnering with the famous street-style blogger Scott Schuman. All in all, this strategy doubled their sales back in 2010 and Burberry has never looked back since.

 Three years later, Burberry decided to go deeper into targeting the younger market segment and came up with another unusual digital based marketing strategy. Burberry decided to partner up with Google to launch a website called kisses.burberry.com. Now as confusing as the name of the website sounds, the process of it is even simpler. Google’s technology allowed Burberry customers to send a kiss, sealed in a digital letter over the internet. It starts off by one person printing their lip on their phone screen which is then converted into a signature form. These signature kisses were, as shown, digitally sealed in a letter which could then be sent in five different shades of Burberry Kisses lipstick.  Another majorly exciting aspect to the process was that once the postcard is sent, the customer could track their postcard on Google Earth and street view. This process allowed customers to see kisses moving around the world electronically and which area is receiving the most kisses. The kisses were dispatched via e-mail, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. This is not where it ended. Once the recipient received the postcard he/she would be invited to reply with another kiss.

Creating the kiss

Kisses displayed on a map

This is the kind, of basic customer engagement which gave Burberry a boost as a band name globally. People who had known of it as a classic luxury brand now saw it as hip and cool! Even though these kisses don’t have much to do with the brand products, the people at Burberry believed it was more about the experience than what the thing itself is. David Bailey, CEO who joined in 2014 and has now left the company in 2018, was the person who felt strongly about how this gives Burberry customers an experience no fashion brand has even thought of doing. The key element which the people at Burberry managed to touch was understanding how essential personal consumer interaction is when it comes to fashion marketing. Even though Burberry kisses is not operational anymore, its short and successful reign helped Burberry achieve results they had never done before. Burberry landed around 14,000 kiss engagements on Facebook whilst tallying an accumulated amount of 60,000,000 plus media impressions on other networks. Words cannot describe how successful this campaign was because it combined fashion with the most personal thing in the world, a kiss. The success was at its peak when #burberrykisses was the most trending thing overall social media platforms for some time. The reason behind this campaign wasn’t to promote one single product but this really helped Burberry with their lipstick range. I believe that Burberry has done well to establish itself as a brand which is considered cool amongst the younger generation. Their market in older people will never go away as they are a truly classic fashion brand. Moreover, they have worked their way through social media even more and now showcase their items through Snapchat as well. Starting hashtag trends again and using celebrity-influence based marketing, even more, could help them achieve their goals faster. I think the people at Burberry should keep doing what they do, but if in the near future they come up with something innovative like Burberry Kisses, it will truly be a hit!