Burberry Co-Creation: Designed by the People

Title: Burberry Co-Creation: Designed by the People

Industry: Fashion

Web References:Burberry, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wikipedia

Burberry is an international luxury fashion house known for their distinctive plaid pattern and signature trench coat. The British icon has a rich history that dates back to 1856. Burberry heavily invested into their digital presence online under the leadership of Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry from 2006 to 2014. Ahrendts recognized that consumers speak a digital language and that Burberry needs to weave social media into the whole customer experience. Currently, the fashion house is a digital role model, surpassing  textbook social media interactions with their customer by exercising co-creation.

A partnership between Burberry and Salesforce.com, was key in facilitating co-creation and dialogue between corporate, employees and customers. Salesforce is a third party company, which specializes in customer relationship management through personalized interfaces. Burberry leveraged the suite of applications created by Salesforce to have a digital relationship with their customers. Salesforce has been a leader in connecting companies and the customer.

 

 

Burberry has used the Salesforce.com’s Chatter program to harvest costumer feedback to educate their operations and development. Customer’s feedback, good or bad was streamed to Burberry staff. An example was when customers were unhappy with the fit of a particular suit style. This was captured in the Chatter platform and relayed to the design team, who made changes. According to the Harvard Business Review, “Through Salesforce software program called Chatter, sales and service people not only have access to traditional CRM transactional data, they can also see an aggregation of their customers’ social media activities and can comment, in the store or remotely, on customers’ recent Tweets or blog entries. All of that’s from the store staffer’s point of view. […] The scope of co-creation is not limited to the sales and service interaction. Customers can remotely participate in fashion shows and order items directly off the runway. They can suggest designs for the next trench coat.” Burberry has gathered and utilized the opinions of their customers through social platforms and has benefited greatly from a co-creation model.

 

 

Lessons learned: Burberry engages their consumer to have a dialogue with their brand.  Burberry is able to utilize this data to design and market products. In terms of design and development, the feedback is economically beneficial. The consumer would also  appreciate the dialogue, which will likely result in more sales. Burberry is a leader in co-creation as they have proactively tried to facilitate a collaborative culture.

Submitted By: Stephanie Lau, SMBP Student, University of Waterloo