Overview
Burberry is a fashion and luxury company which creation remounts to 1856, when Thomas Burberry opened a draper’s shop in Basingstoke, England. Burberry-lined trench coats, worn by British soldiers in WWI, became a company icon. This brand was highly dependent on licensing and distribution arrangements and had a narrow set of products.
Around 1980s the company started making losses because of its old-fashioned products, so in 1997 Rose Marie Bravo assumed the leadership of the company. Bravo and her team had a main objective that was to revitalize the brand, updating the product line, expanding the brand portfolio and creating new advertisement campaigns.
Question 1 - Marketing Situation
Company: Burberry is a company that nowadays sells a wide range of luxury products; they sell from apparel to accessories as handbags, shoes, hats, ties, and so on, and to licensed products as fragrances or eyewear. The brand is known for its heritage, history and functionality. Burberry wanted to create the image of an accessible luxury.
In the 1920s Burberry was introduced as a registered trademark, and was seen as a symbol of luxury and durability, after that by the 1990s Burberry was sold to a British company, Great Universal Stores Plc. (GUS) and by the 1970s GUS management agreed to license the brand in Japan. The product started to grow worldwide, but due to the fact that a wide range of product categories become licensed the products began to vary across markets (price, design, and quality). The product line was being sold in an intensive way, missing the main values of the original brand, lacking the exclusivity that a luxury good normally requires.
Collaborators: The Burberry products are divided by non-licensed products as menswear, womenswear and accessories, and licensed products as fragrances, eyewear, timepieces and childrenswear. With non-licensed products, Burberry has control over all of the process. When there is need of licensed products, Burberry works with licensees that have the right to design, manufacture, and distribute products under Burberry name.
In order to end with the inconsistencies in price, design, and quality through markets, several older licensing agreements were diluted.
According to the distributors, the company started to have a higher control over this part of the process, ending negotiation with some older distributors, renewing with others and buying new ones.
Customers: Concerning the customers, Burberry products are made for people with a medium to high standard of living, people that want to have and preserve a high social status, people who look for high quality, exclusive and durable products. Nowadays this brand is not only used by royalties and aristocrats (as was in the beginning) but also by celebrities, rappers, and a younger segment of people.
In general this brand can achieve segments of older people that want a classic appearance but also younger segments that want to be innovative and contemporary. This can be proved by the two very distinct awards Burberry won: the Contemporary Design Collection of the Year Award, and previously the Classic Design Collection of the Year.
Competitors: Moreover attending to the competition there are a range of brands that are in the market for decades, with the same specific segment as a target – young to old high income people that want status/quality/exclusivity.
The top luxury good player is Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, followed by Polo Ralph Lauren and for Richemont. But this competition can be analyzed specifically for Apparel and Accessories (that are the main products of Burberry): for apparel the main competitors are Louis Vuitton(23%), Gucci (12%), Hermes (8%), Coach (6%), Prada (4%), Ferragamo (4%), Polo Ralph Loren (4%), Chanel (3%) and TOD’s (3%), where the major player is Louis Vuitton achieving the higher percentage of market share (23%) .
Then for Accessories Polo Ralph Loren have a higher market share (9%) followed by Hugo Boss (3%), Burberry (3%) and Max Mara (3%).
Here it is important to remark that even if Burberry is in the mid-table, it is competing in the both markets.
Regarding the positioning, it was quite different before the entrance of Rose Marie Bravo comparing to the present position.
At the beginning Burberry was seen as a luxury symbol and a long-lasting one because of their original designs and uncompromising quality. The usual costumers started to say “Give me my Burberry!” Those customers were wealthy high-middle class people. The brand was situated in high price but also high durability.
Immediately before the entrance of Bravo, the brand lost some value, the brand was not fulfilling some of the main original values of the company, and also because ‘parallel trading’. The customer base became concentrated among older males and Asian tourists. The brand was positioned away from Luxury Goods, and also the quality was compromised, being away also from the Durability.
After Rose Marie Bravo assumed leadership she started a new re-positioning, trying to achieve the initial positioning but with some new aspects, make the brand perceived as an “accessible luxury” keeping the core customers but also achieving new young customers. Burberry nowadays is confortably positioned between Lifestyle (represented by Ralph Loren) and Fashion (represented by Gucci). Context: According to the social/cultural environment this brand is well adapted to society’s trends and fashions, in one hand they want to preserve the heritage of the brand having some original models that last for generations, and in other hand they have collections fashion-oriented that follows the market trends.
Regarding technological environment, there are technological developments that allow the counterfeit production of this brand, but it not seems to be a big concern due to the fact that the Burberry customers/lovers claim quality and will not be persuaded by cheaper products with ‘the same fake label’. The only issue is if ‘very common people’ start to be associated to the brand, maybe this can alienate some Burberry’s core customers.
Is Burberry’s competitive position sustainable over the long term?
Overall, Burberry’s competitive positioning is sustainable over the long run. While brands like Coach and Gucci are more focused on accessories and Armani and Polo focus more on the apparel market, Burberry has penetrated effectively both in the accessory and apparel market at the same time as remained a luxury good. Burberry has also succeeded is positioning itself between brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren and Armani in apparel, and between Coach and Gucci in accessories.
Burberry also has expanded his Brand Portfolio: Burberry London, Burberry Blue and Black labels, Thomas Burberry, and Prorsum. This allows for more high-end goods and goods that would be accessible by the general population. Burberry’s positioning of functional luxury is extremely competitive and will continue over the long-term.

Question 2 – Marketing Mix
“Bravo’s goal was to “transform Burberry” (…) into a luxury lifestyle brand”
Product: Concerning the component product, Bravo’s first action was merely cosmetic, she changed the company’s name from Burberry’s to Burberry, and she also changed the logo to a more contemporary one and the same for packaging.
Moreover Bravo started to revert back the original objective of the brand that was to be a luxury brand. There was a significant allocation in R&D, in order to understand the gaps in the market, and discovering whether position could Burberry occupy to fill one of those gaps. The following step was updating the Product line; there was a significant reduction of the stock, in order to avoid outdated items, and Burberry products became continuous (classic items that do now become outmoded, like the trench coat) or fashion-oriented (collection by collection basis). The collection was divided in womenswear, menswear and accessories. There was an expansion of the brand portfolio (Thomas Burberry, Burberry Blue, Burberry Black, Prorsum), a check management by restrained use of trademark checks and also a strong implementation of “check under cover”.
Price: The main action was to raise the prices in order to reflect the new brand positioning, the gross margins raised from 47% (2000) to 56% (2003) . With this the brand started again being associated to exclusivity, elite, aspirational but also trendy.
For other side, there was a creation of lower-priced labels but this was to attract more young fashion-conscious customers.
Place: Bravo in order to get exclusive distribution bought some of the distributors and this was to preserve the brand image. Burberry opened Flagship stores in London, Barcelona, and New York City and directly operated stores; there was a strategic location near luxury brand outlets and also known restaurants.
Promotion: To promote the new Burberry brand image, Bravo hired a team with Mario Testino (an important photographer in the fashion world), a creative director Fabien Baron and a new advertising agent David Lipman with the purpose to produce a new remarkable advertisement campaign, but never forgetting that it was important to stay true to Burberry heritage.
The advertisement campaign was done in two phases with the main objective to attract the different public target. The first ads were with Stella Tenant, a British Aristocrat were the main issue was to attract the older segment, the more classic one. The second phase was with Kate Moss, in order to communicate their modern, fashion-oriented side. There were also ads with both models, transmitting like the brand can connect both types of personalities, the fashion-oriented with the classical ones not losing the main values of the brand.
Was the mix consistent?
To evaluate the consistency each element in the marketing mix must work well with the others. The four components Product, Price, Place and Promotion need to support each other. In this case, the Burberry Company sells high quality products, and they are perceived as such in the market. For this reason this brand can achieve huge gross margins through the high prices they charge, meaning that the high prices reflect the high quality of the products. Regarding the Promotion, the quality of the advertisements is also high; they are created and developed by famous professionals, with lots of recognized work in the fashion world, and always with well-known celebrities. Finally attempting in the component Place, it is also managed at a high level, limited distributors to keep the exclusivity, strategic flagship stores, and outlets. So in conclusion, evaluating all of the components as high leveled it can be said that the marketing mix actions developed by Rose Marie Bravo were consistent.