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Zoom on Burberry's Website
Taka Okazaki-Leblanc | January/February 2010
The 154-year-old British brand Burberry, known for its iconic trench coat and check pattern, has a rich heritage and classic style that won’t date. Since the brand revamped its image in the 90s, it has become one of the most forward thinking luxury brands in terms of its integration of innovation and technology. Burberry has demonstrated that it is one of the few luxury brands to understand the current evolution of the web and to integrate digital age in an elevated form online. Christopher Bailey, the Chief Creative Officer of Burberry who is also responsible for the company’s overall image both online and offline highlighted this in a recent interview with The Independent, “It’s not just about the clothes, it’s about how you communicate the clothes, the attitude of the clothes, the environment the clothes are going to sit in. How, for example, can you ignore the whole digital explosion that’s happening?” The Burberry website shows an amalgamation of the old and the new in terms of new digital media and the traditional luxury quality of sophistication and desire.
Welcome page of burberry.com
Burberry’s online corporate presence is currently composed of two websites and both of them will be analyzed in this article as they are both linked, can be considered as one and also complementary to each other.
The first is the corporate website burberry.com that provides ample images and information about the company, the brand and the online store.
The second website is the social community platform of the brand, artofthetrench.com, launched in November 2009. It came along as a ‘bang’ rather than a simple buzz, for it was the first online community created by a luxury brand that embraces the codes of the social media. This is particularly true in the context of bandwagon effect prevalent in the luxury sector, which is all about hopping on the existing platforms of Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Myspace in a bid to outdo competitors rather than to do good to the brand.
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