Burberry Bespoke brand dillusion?
British fashion label Burberry has launched an online customisation service for its iconic trench coats, Burberry Bespoke.
Aping the likes of Nike ID, Burberry’s website allows fashion lovers to create their own versions of the brand’s best known coats, changing colour, and details like lining, collar, buttons, belt etc, and share them via Twitter, Facebook and email.
Shoppers can also arrange a call with a Burberry member of staff, or discuss their purchase live over Google’s Gchat IM service.
uk.burberry.com/store/bespoke
Contagious Insight /
Fashion has been slow to catch up with other industries in digital marketing, but Burberry has been amongst those leading the pack, introducing iPad live streaming of its shows, Tweetwalk (where Burberry’s twitter followers were sent exclusive twitpics of the looks before they hit the runway at London Fashion Week), and now Burberry Bespoke.
But while the mechanics of Burberry Bespoke are much like Nike ID - adjust clothing to your tastes - we wonder whether this is really what luxury and fashion brands are about, what it truly delivers to consumers against their brand image, and whether that might be damaging. The share functionliaty is a good way to spread the service across social networks, while the call and chat functions are a smart way to bring some of the personal, in-store experience online.
Personalisation has long been a way for luxury brands to assert the craft of their products and their uniqueness to each consumer. But it’s always been about exclusivity, top notch in-person customer service and a strong sense of the auteur’s vision that defines the mystique of fashion. With that in mind, does mass personalisation dilute the brand?
Burberry is treading a fine line here between growing its global base by giving consumers a measure of personalisation - which is a good thing in terms of product offering - and being so accessible and mass market in its e-commerce that it puts off the influential, high-spending fashionistas who it has studiously cultivated and who have made it very successful. The danger is that by reaching for the future of fashion e-commerce, Burberry is democratising their brand into dilution.
This story originally appeared on Contagious Feed. Contagious Feed is our bespoke trends, inspiration, insight and analysis service, providing daily innovative marketing intelligence across a comprehensive range of sectors to brands and agencies across the world.
Contagious Insight /
Xbox chose the perfect entertainment brands as partners. Sesame Street and Nat Geo are well-trusted, iconic brands that are educational enough to please parents but popular and fun enough to appeal to kids. We recently wrote a trend on augmented content, which details how brands can enhance traditional TV viewing and Xbox’s work is an excellent example of a brand doing something innovative to really improve the viewer’s experience.
As research we reported on last month showed, television is still a major player when it comes to entertaining children, so Xbox had the right idea to use this medium to appeal to new customers. While Nintendo appears to have conquered the family and children demographic in the gaming world, these new project will make parents shopping for Christmas presents see the Xbox with fresh eyes. Xbox has collaborated with the writers of popular TV shows so that the high quality of the entertainment remains the same, while parents will be happy to see their little ones jumping about, rather than sinking deeper into the couch.
This story originally appeared on Contagious Feed.
“ There are businesses that succeed by doing traditional things slightly better than the competition. And there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy… Entrepreneurship depends on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, merely evidence of conformity and lack of imagination… Like a novelist who finds the means to express familiar but hitherto undefined perceptions, who makes cogent phrases out of what we have all of us felt yet never understood, the entrepreneur takes tremors of dissatisfaction and longing, and transforms them into commercial concerns.
Really like this… The narrator is asking questions about details of the car… almost like benefits of this car but I feel that they don’t resonate as much as they could. I wonder if the questions asked were more benefit driven and if they taped in more to the idea of why being from were it was made is a good thing.
Great ad, diversifying it’s brand. By tapping into aspiration marketing in what i think is done very well.
Case study by droga5 with BING and Decoded by Jay Z
droga5 is a ad firm that I found browsing youtube. Located in New York I was taken by their outlook: Creatively led, strategically driven, technology friendly, humanity obsessed…
What I liked about how they describe themselves is that…
Creativity is what makes uniqueness
Strategy serves a plan for success to the goal
Technology friendly instead of user friendly… its not about technology being the base its the technology being the medium…
Humanity obsessed its about the human experience which can stir an emotion… and that can be powerful.
