This thinking also shapes how the brand uses social media. “In luxury, people love to strive for the billboard or print, but the reality is [our brand] is mostly experienced through mobile devices and social platforms, and our teams have really embraced that,” says Kiman. Instead of creating content in parallel, the social team now has a standing spot in content review sessions, as well as a clearer role on-set. “Social has a big seat at the table when it comes to our campaigns. We don’t go to set if they’re not on the schedule,” says Kiman.
Now, social teams have been brought into the development much earlier, which lends itself to more experimentation, particularly in short-form video. For the 170th-anniversary campaign, Burberry’s social team asked stars, including Jonathan Bailey and Kendall Jenner, questions such as the most British thing they’ve done, or advice for first-time visitors to London. The brand has also leaned into niche British TikTokers such as Bus Aunty (Bemi Orojuogun), who posed with a Burberry red bus (generating 11.2 million views), and Crazy Auntie Ann who pretend DJ’ed in her kitchen wearing Burberry check jacket (generating 12.4 million views). “There’s a whole curriculum for marketing degrees out there, then there’s this outstanding bit of work,” one commenter wrote.
British luxury, marketed globally
Britishness sits at the center of Burberry’s positioning — but most of its customers aren’t British, and nor is Kiman, who grew up in the US. For him, the challenge is about calibrating between an imagined and a real version of Britain. “I’ve always been an outsider in my roles. Most people experience wanderlust — looking across borders and being inspired — and that is something that happens at a very young age,” he says. “You don’t feel that about your home market. Sometimes, you feel [a projection] is on the nose, but the fact I’ve lived in different cities lets me acknowledge that bias while leveraging it. We have to be really proud even about the postcard version of London and the UK that we’re projecting, and at the same time show we have insider knowledge.”
The marketing team has spent significant time defining what that actually means in practice, from romanticized visual references like the Big Ben and the British countryside, to globally recognized British talent such as Cara Delevingne and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, to softer cultural codes such as weather, wit, and humor. Humor, in particular, is one of the trickiest to get right. “It’s hard to tell a joke at the dinner table where everyone is going to laugh — and that’s our challenge when we lean into wit. Will everyone understand this?” says Kiman.
Some ideas never made it to consumers. In the early stages of the reset, projects were sometimes pulled late in the process if they didn’t quite land. “We had stumbling blocks with that early on, where we would talk to our regions and they would say, ‘We don’t understand what this joke is about,’” he says. “So now, if we’re playing with wit, it needs to be understandable — or we’ll give you the background story and the narrative to help it be digested.”