For the second consecutive year, British luxury fashion house Burberry has earned the No. 1 spot in L2 Digital IQ Index: Fashion. Beating out 63 other luxury brands in the study – including six other digital ‘Geniuses’ – Burberry came out on top across more than 675 data points in four main areas: site, digital marketing, social media, and mobile, benchmarking and education firm L2 said on its website. Burberry is one of eight index brands to offer digital product customization with its microsite “Burberry Bespoke.” Customers are able to design their own trench coat, from selecting the fabric lining to designing the monogram, and then share their bespoke creations to friends on Twitter and Facebook. Capitalizing on its iconic trench coat, Burberry leveraged digital technology to launch a multichannel campaign this year around weather. The effort launched in February when the brand orchestrated a fake thunderstorm during its FW12 show at London Fashion Week. The rain motif continued with a partnership with The Weather Channel during the Summer Olympics. The brand launched weather based ads on social media, out-of-home, and mobile on The Weather Channel’s iPhone and iPad apps. Depending on the weather in London, digital ads promoted different Burberry products to fit with the forecast. For two years, Burberry has maintained the largest Facebook community across index brands with 7,523,487 and 13, 278,083 number of “Likes” in 2011 and 2012, respectively. There is a strong relationship between the size of a brand’s Facebook community and its volume of monthly searches on Google – a proxy for a brand’s online equity. Using our model, which predicts 1 Facebook fan for every 1.3 Google monthly searches, Burberry acquired a larger-than-predicted Facebook community and earned the status of Overachiever. Trailing the brand closely in Facebook community size is Lacoste, another brand with the Overachiever status. Burberry’s commitment to digital is exemplified across all its platforms, even offline. Their new Regent Street store opening sets the standard for digital in-store integration. Designed as a physical manifestation of its website, full length screens throughout the space alternate between streaming visual content and doubling as mirrors. Select merchandise are tagged with RFID chips that customers can scan for more information on the product – for example, how it was worn on the runway. Over 60 per cent of Burberry’s annual marketing budget is devoted to digital, which is more than triple the market average. The company’s devotion to constant digital innovation not only earned it the top ranking in this year’s study, but proves that online marketing and protecting the brand heritage can indeed go hand in hand. L2 Digital IQ Index are given below:
