The Tamesis
This thinking also determines how brands use social media. “In the luxury industry, people like to strive for billboards or print, but the reality is [our brand] “Our social team has gained experience primarily through mobile and social platforms, and our team has really embraced that,” says Kiman. Instead of creating content in parallel, the social team now has a seat at the table in content review meetings and has a more defined role on-site. If they weren’t on the schedule, we wouldn’t be on set,” Kidman said.
Now that the social team has been involved in development earlier, this has allowed for more experimentation, especially with short videos. As part of its 170th anniversary campaign, Burberry’s social team asked stars including Jonathan Bailey and Kendall Jenner questions such as the most British thing they’ve ever done, or advice to first-time visitors to London. The brand has also leaned into niche British TikTokers, such as Bus Aunty (Bemi Orojuogun) posing with a Burberry red bus (generating 11.2 million views), and Crazy Auntie Ann wearing a Burberry plaid jacket and pretending to DJ in the kitchen (generating 12.4 million views). “There’s a whole range of courses for a marketing degree, plus this great job,” one commenter wrote.
British luxury goods, marketed around the world
Britishness is central to Burberry’s positioning – but most of its customers are not British, and neither is Kidman, who grew up in the United States. For him, the challenge is to calibrate between the imagined Britain and the real Britain. “In my role, I’ve always been an outsider. Most people have wanderlust – looking across borders and being inspired – and it’s something that happens at a very young age,” he said. “You don’t feel that way about your home market. Sometimes, you feel [a projection] It’s obvious, but the fact that I live in a different city allows me to acknowledge this bias while taking advantage of it. Even for the postcard version of London and the UK that we are planning, we have to be very proud and show that we have insider knowledge. “
The marketing team spent a lot of time defining what this actually meant in practice, from romanticized visual references like Big Ben and the British countryside, to globally recognized British talents like Cara Delevingne and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, to softer cultural codes like weather, wit and humour. Humor, in particular, is one of the most difficult to master. “It’s hard to tell a joke at the dinner table that everyone will laugh at—that’s the challenge we face when we use our wits. Will everyone get it?” Kidman said.
Some ideas never reach consumers. In the early stages of a reset, projects are sometimes delayed if they are not fully off the ground. “We hit a roadblock in the beginning, we would talk to our districts and they would say, ‘We don’t understand what the joke is,'” he said. “So now, if we’re going to play wit, it has to be understandable – otherwise we’ll give you backstory and narrative to help you understand it.”
