Reformed Burberry to explore social media

Burberry, the famous British luxury fashion brand has announced their plans for a social network website to be available next month. The reason behind the website named artofthetrench.com, is to offer consumers a stronger brand experience. Artofthetrench.com will feature users sending in pictures of themselves wearing the famous Burberry trenchcoats. Burberry currently has over 660,000 fans on Facebook, more than any other luxury brand, and this is seen as an encouraging sign for CEO, Angela Ahrendts.

"These might not even be customers yet. Or they may be a customer for a bottle of fragrance or for eyewear," she said.

"But these are the customers who need the brand experience, who need to feel the brand. That word-of-mouth spreads through their social networks and continues to be a positive conversation [about Burberry] . . . that is so powerful."

Burberry has been working to overcome an image problem in recent years and have made significant steps to do so. The brand has in the past been associated with football hooliganism and 'chavs'. It was forced to dump Kate Moss in 2005 after after the supermodel was pictured allegedly snorting cocaine. However, now Burberry has generated a buzz of real excitement around it leading up to London Fashion Week.

I believe that the social network will have some fairly minimal levels of success. I think that simply asking people to send in pictures of themselves in Burberry clothing is not a strong enough incentive to become actively involved with the website for a meaningful length of time. Also because Burberry has a large number of fans does not necessarily mean that they all own Burberry products. They could just admire their work.

If Burberry can come up with a stronger mixture of content and added incentives then I'm sure they will have greater success with this approach.