Contents
- About Burberry
- Who is Burberry’s Target Market?
- What is Burberry’s Unique Selling Point?
- What is Burberry’s Digital Marketing Strategy?
- Why is Burberry a Good Case Study?
About Burberry
A military history
Burberry is a household name in luxury fashion, and one that’s essentially synonymous with British fashion culture on the world stage. Founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, its origins lie in military apparel: the iconic trench coat was originally created for WW1 soldiers before it grew into a fashion phenomenon.
Like so many other innovations, wartime pressure led to unprecedented innovation. In creating the soldier’s coat, Burberry invented Gabardine – a revolutionary waterproof and breathable fabric – as well as adding novel features like storm shield collars.
After the war, the coat found a new purpose in civilian life, embraced for its practicality and timeless style. While some features (like the epaulets and D-rings) had no everyday function, these military vestiges became the hallmarks of Burberry coats.
Originally used only for the coat lining, Burberry’s checked pattern was just a subtle detail. A buyer at Harrods 1960s turned it inside out to showcase it – a simple act that organically transformed the check from hidden feature to a brand hallmark.
Burberry began to introduce more fashion-forward collections in the 70s and 80s, before really embracing the luxury lifestyle concept in the nineties and noughties. After decades of classic, durability-led designs, the brand began injecting high fashion into its DNA with modern, artistically led new cuts and celebrity endorsements.
Burberry today
Today, Burberry stands confidently among the world’s innovative luxury fashion brands. However, like its peers, Burberry understands that it takes more than inspired clothing lines to stay relevant and engage modern audiences.
The brand is active in the digital sphere, constantly surprising us with everything from creative campaigns to augmented reality, livestreaming, and leadership in luxury fashion sustainability. As it has for decades past, Burberry continues to evolve while never losing touch with its roots.
Who is Burberry’s Target Market?
Burberry is a household name for luxury fashion: its long history, high quality pieces, and a legacy of timeless elegance ensure that it remains popular among affluent and professional audiences.
Despite this elite reputation, the brand is proving itself adept at engaging consumers across a range of age and wealth brackets – in fact, Burberry sales growth in recent years has been primarily among Millennial and Gen Z customers.
Burberry is working to win the hearts of this younger, primarily female audience by complementing its iconic lines with new ranges of streetwear and a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Broadening your target audience so significantly is a calculated risk. It requires finesse and careful construction of product and marketing operations to widen appeal while avoiding alienation.
The key to Burberry’s success here is modernisation that always respects its own traditions. There are new clothing lines, but its core products will always remain, unchanged in both looks and their key value of lasting quality.
This is paralleled across their marketing efforts, too. They’re hugely active in the digital sphere because they appreciate that their Millennial and Gen Z audiences live, breathe and buy there – while their older audiences tend to consume media entirely elsewhere (such as in store, tv or in print).
By recognising the different product needs that their different markets have, as well as the differences in how they consume content, Burberry can offer value to multiple distinct audiences without alienating one in favour of the other.
What is Burberry’s Unique Selling Point?
Heritage and quality are the twin pillars of the company’s appeal. In Burberry’s own words: “Our business model is rooted in British craftsmanship.”
Among the longstanding luxury fashion brands, almost all of which have European origins, Burberry is the standard bearer of British culture. This fusion with the cultural identity of a nation isn’t something that can be bought or delivered through a few seasons of brand marketing. Burberry has cultivated this connection over the course of decades, beginning with – literally – creating new clothing to support the nation during a time of existential threat: World War One.
That’s why today, when people see the Burberry trench coat or checked pattern, they think Britain – as much as they would seeing Big Ben or a red telephone box.
The other element in Burberry’s lasting niche in the high fashion scene is its quality craftsmanship. The brand recently outlined its customer types: in addition to the opinionated and hedonistic customer archetypes, which are fashion led, they also identified investor and conservative customer types, who prioritise quality. These quality-led customers are willing to pay the Burberry premium for hardwearing, lifelong pieces that are as functional as they are elegant.
Burberry still uses and retains the patent for gabardine, invented by its founder in 1879, and uses the same Burberry checked cotton for coat linings that it has since the 1920s. This ironclad, physical tradition is something that few other brands can lay a claim to.
This heritage is combined with modernity at every turn, from contemporary twists on its classic pieces to unique digital marketing methods that evoke its cultural spirit in new and exciting ways.
What is Burberry’s Digital Marketing Strategy?
Building Cross-Functional Digital Goals
Burberry has been a trailblazer in embracing the digital as a luxury fashion company – it declared its ambition to become ‘fully digital’ as far back as 2006.
As digital technology development continues to accelerate, Burberry’s innovations continue to grow. For Burberry, digital transformation means much more than computerisation and internal process reform. This forward-looking ethos that influences every element of the company’s functions, from customer service to marketing or successfully embracing ecommerce.
By bringing visionaries with tech backgrounds and skillsets into leadership positions, this long-established luxury fashion brand has been consistently able to pivot and grow with the flexibility and energy of a disruptor brand – ensuring their continued relevance in a digital world.
Influencer Partnerships
Burberry has always thrived through iconic and intelligently crafted partnerships. In recent years the brand has moved on from its previous focus on TV ads and long-standing celebrity endorsements to a social-led approach.
Burberry has a reach of more than 50M across its social platforms, primarily Instagram and TikTok. The celebrity element remains strong, with a roster including Adam Driver, Shakira, Kano and others, but influencers now stand alongside them.
The sheer volume of influencer activity is impressive, with hundreds of influencer mentions per quarter. Burberry works across the influencer ecosystem, engaging everyone from mega influencers like Aimee Song (7.3M followers) to mid-level creators like Tania Sarin (655K followers) and Meeka Hossain (355K followers).
Connecting Through Storytelling
Burberry knows that its enduring power is its deep connection to the city of London. Not only is that story explored and revelled in across the brand, but Burberry applies that same ethos of quality craftsmanship to its digital storytelling as it does the quintessential trench coats.
Burberry’s Summer 2025 campaign is ‘It’s Always Burberry Weather: London in love’, taking a deeply romantic attitude to London’s propensity for rain all year round. This wasn’t just any old campaign – they built out an exceptionally star-studded cast of British actors (from Kate Winslet to Michael Ward, Aimey Lou Wood, Nicholas Hoult, and Richard E. Grant) for a beautifully crafted short film designed to make your heart swell as rain falls on Burberry umbrellas and star-crossed lovers in trench coats.
The brand didn’t stop there, but built out a range of social assets to support their flagship media – filling their Instagram with behind-the-scenes stills and videos of their leading cast. Despite their home on different channels, the tone and emotion of each and every asset in the campaign is dialled in perfectly.
Innovating with Technology
Burberry is tapping into the full range of digital tools to revolutionise the way its audiences can interact with the brand and its products.
That ranges from an augmented reality (AR) powered ‘Virtual Try On’ tool in December 2024, allowing users to browse and apply scarves to themselves through their smartphone, to a slew of pop-ups around the globe that usher visitors into a fully VR shopping space in 2022, in partnership with Harrods.
Alongside campaigns, Burberry applied that same digital-first approach to its website, creating a fully interactive space where users can seamlessly journey through the brand’s heritage, collections and experience flagship media like their Summer 2025 Campaign film ‘It’s Always Burberry Weather: London in Love’.
Why is Burberry a Good Case Study?
The world is full of indie brands and disrupters charging into the market and turning it on its head. But what about established brands, those who have lasted generations and are now tasked with lasting another – digital, social-led one?
Burberry didn’t just adapt to the digital age; they leveraged it. By proving that innovative digital strategies – when kept in alignment with a strong core of brand identity – can cultivate lasting relevance and consumer loyalty in a busy digital landscape, Burberry serve us the perfect blueprint for navigating changing markets as a legacy brand.
