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Burberry Case

MKT701 Seminar in Current International Marketing
Rome, April 8, 2008

Case on Burberry

Introduction

The fashion industry, and especially luxury branding is one of the riskiest industries. Survival on the long-run requires a very complex focus on customers and a very flexible team to be able to renew continuously according to customer needs at the same time and keeping as well as providing a consistent brand image at the same time.

Burberry has been a well known brand since decades. However, by the end of the 1990s, although the business was still profitable, earnings quality became very low. The brand was stodgy looking and conservative and skewed to an older customer base only. The company was very heavily reliant on narrow-base of core products and its customer base had become heavily concentrated on older males and Asian tourists.   The brand required reinvention to be able to survive in the market.

When Rose Marie Bravo came on the Burberry boat in 1997, she had to transform the 150-year-old brand from a tired outwear manufacturer into a luxury lifestyle brand that was aspirational, stylish, and innovative. The immediate changes included the change of Burberry’s to Burberry and a new logo as well as packaging was introduced.

Repositioning
The first and most important step was to reposition the brand to be able to attract younger customers while retaining Burberry’s core customer base. Ms. Bravo very capably realized and decided that there was a niche for Burberry between labels like Polo Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani in apparel and between Coach and Gucci in accessories.
”We focused on a particular price point and a particular bracket. We knew we did not want to be cutting-edge fashion, ….but we also knew we did not want to be just classic because there were enough of those brands. We wanted Burberry to represent accessible luxury”. The brand is different from other luxury products in a sense that it has functionality besides being...