Leverage the Franchise

Leverage The Franchise

Enhance consumer resonance and operate more effectively through exacting use of brand assets and coordinated action across the global organisation. One brand, one company.

Key highlights from 2012/13 include:

Brand momentum

Ensuring the strength, purity and positioning of the Burberry brand remained a priority.

Burberry World Live

• Burberry Regent Street opened in London in September 2012 as the brand’s most comprehensive expression to date. Introducing the concept of ‘Burberry World Live’, Regent Street blurred the physical and the digital to bring all aspects of burberry.com (‘Burberry World’) to life in a meticulously-restored heritage space.
• Offering the full collection in a digitally-enriched environment, Regent Street engaged customers with brand content continuously projected on over 100 screens throughout the store, including product-specific content triggered by RFID-enabled merchandise on mirrors that turn instantly to screens. In-store audiences could watch key brand moments live from other locations, including the womenswear S/S13 and A/W13 runway shows.
• Regent Street also gave physical expression to the brand’s most innovative digital launches. This included live music events featuring Burberry Acoustic artists and the first in-store Burberry Bespoke experience.

Beauty

• In October 2012, Burberry announced the transition of its fragrance and make-up business from a licensed to a directly operated structure.
• As consumers’ most widely encountered expression of the Burberry brand, Beauty provides outstanding growth opportunities for the Group. Business integration was completed during the year with operations commencing on 1 April 2013.
  

Digital

• Investments in burberry.com continued with expanded delivery to over 100 countries, while the introduction of Spanish and Korean brought the number of languages online to eight.
• Retail theatre was rolled out to a further 84 stores, extending the global streaming of brand content in all flagship markets.

Brand recognition

• Listed in Interbrand’s ‘Top 100 Global Brands’ for the fourth consecutive year, Burberry was named the luxury fashion brand with the greatest increase in brand value. Burberry was cited by Altagamma as the luxury brand with the highest digital customer awareness and led media think tank L2’s ‘Fashion Digital IQ Index’ for the second year, as well as being named by L2 as the fashion brand with the highest ‘digital IQ’ in China. LinkedIn ranked Burberry the 29th most in-demand employer globally.

Marketing innovation

Continued extension of its reach through marketing innovation, leveraging brand content to engage and connect global audiences.

Digital engagement

• Brand excitement was driven globally across a range of platforms. The S/S13 main campaign generated record awareness through social and traditional media, with the launch video generating over 1.7 million views
  on YouTube and Burberry trending globally on Twitter. The womenswear A/W13 show was streamed live on Twitter for the first time, allowing followers to embed the show stream in personal newsfeeds.
• Burberry finished the year as the most followed luxury brand on Facebook, with nearly 15 million fans. Total lifetime YouTube video views reached nearly 24 million and the brand’s combined Twitter following was over two million. Burberry was also the leading luxury lifestyle brand on Instagram.
  

Outdoor investment

• Investment was increased in out-of-home marketing in key markets. To emphasise the brand’s association with weather, Burberry streamed live images of London scenes simultaneously throughout the Olympic period to prominent outdoor sites in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and New York.
• The Art Of The Trench social media platform was taken to outdoor spaces in London and Chicago in conjunction with flagship store launches.
• More broadly, the brand secured key airport and iconic urban locations on a long-term basis.

Product excellence

Burberry creates great product through intensive focus on design innovation, quality and core heritage icons.

Outerwear

• Outerwear is the core of the apparel business, underpinned by monthly fashion groups and a robust replenishment programme. Leveraging the brand’s unique heritage together with design innovation and excellence, outerwear accounted for about 50% of mainline apparel sales. The iconic trench coat continued to be a central feature of the brand’s marketing activities.
  

Mens

• Investments in infrastructure saw increased product and marketing excellence in men’s outerwear, London and Brit. As the fastest growing product division, mens represented 24% of retail/wholesale revenue.
• Retail sales of men’s tailoring, available in over 70 mainline stores, grew by nearly 70% year-on-year and the first dedicated standalone mens store opened in Knightsbridge, London.
  

Product hierarchy

• Burberry Prorsum and London continued to outperform, reflecting customer preferences and representing about half of womens and mens mainline retail sales.
  
• An ongoing focus on innovative product, marketing and merchandising and a shift in the product pyramid mix drove growth in mainline average unit retail prices.
• Runway Made to Order launched, continuing to put the Burberry customer at the centre of increasingly personalised luxury experiences. Engraved nameplates could be added to custom-made outerwear and bags from the womenswear A/W13 collection. Smart personalisation technology was introduced to unlock bespoke digital content relating to each item on touchscreen devices.