Even Angels Need a Push

  Nowadays, we are all aware of that social media brings the changing storm into our life. We feel more influenced by what we see on the internet than ever before, especially in the luxury fashion industry where more budget now has been assigned for various campaigns. In the past, we could get the brand information that includes new collections, fashion posters, and late-season runways from magazines, TV, newspapers, and advertising boards in the metro station. However, over the past decades, the luxury brands’ campaign have been shifted to a very different way, which is the social media marketing. With access to the various platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, the relationship between customers and fashion brands are getting closer because of the interaction and fluidity of fashion. Through the brand promotion campaigns on social media, they obtain the growth of profit to a larger extent.

  Burberry was a traditional British luxury fashion brand, established in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, who developed a unique waterproof and breathable fabric named Gabardine. This unique fabric uses to make trench coats, the world-famous Burberry Trench. 

  Burberry is a pioneer in digital and social media marketing. The brand started to invest in digital and social media marketing in 2009. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts and the creative director Christopher Bailey devised The Art of Trench, which means that customers wear Burberry trench coats and post on the website. To ensure the campaign gets into the public as soon as possible, Burberry chose a fashion blogger Scott Schuman to shoot and share his traveling photos with Burberry coats. Shortly afterward, word of mouth started to spread among customers. It proved to be a craze in a website posting. In China, we have a proverb" the first one to eat crab," which means the first one who is brave to try something new and take the initial risk. Obviously, Burberry was the first one to eat "crab”, while it is also the first one who tasted the “delicious”.

 In the first year, the hashtag with The Art of Trench had 7.5 million views, and this campaign helped Burberry to attract a mass of users on Facebook. Indeed, the revenue was increased rapidly. Burberry deeply understands the strengths of digital and social media marketing. Today, Burberry spend 60% budget on digital and social media marketing. With this generous investment, Burberry ascends to the top 3 popular luxury brands on Facebook. 

 Now, Burberry on Facebook has 17 million users, which is the brand's most popular account. Burberry takes full advantage of Facebook functions. They announce a new collection on each specific album for customers to visit for the first time, they create hashtags with Burberry for consumers to share posts, and they set a "shop now" button on the first page for visitors to buy the production easily.  You like it, you want it, and you buy it.

  
At the same time, Burberry will post the same content to Instagram as they post on Facebook. However, they tend to make the appropriate adjustment to match the Instagram minimalism style. On Instagram, they own 15 million followers, and they prefer to post new collection, new season runway live show, and high-quality fashion video on it. Meanwhile, the brand creates hashtags that belong to different categories on the main page. Thus, users could easily find the content that they want.

 

  For the post content, they tend to advance notice consumers the runway live show date and time, and the collection online sales time. From the below comments of followers, we could know that many fans are waiting to watch the new season runway. These kinds of content attract a mass amount of fans to consume and increase brand awareness. Also, the brand is able to get feedback from users after watching the runway show.

 Burberry as the first brand “eating crab” invested into digital and social media marketing to foster a closer relationship between brand and customers. By utilizing unique internet platform sufficiently, its fashion-forward decisions brought plenty of benefits to Burberry. Besides Facebook and Instagram, Burberry also invests in other various platform for its campaign in different ways according to their distinctive features. With the “push” from social media, now Burberry has stronger wings.

  As we know, digital and social marketing are indispensable for brand promotion, which includes major corporations and small business entities. In the following days, we are going to talk about small business entities and web celebrities on how to utilize these platforms to develop and obtain their benefits.