The Case of Burberry

The Case of Burberry

 Title

                                                     “Burberry”

                                                     Institution                        

1. How is Burberry perceived in the market place? How does the present image compare to the past and the factors, which made the brand successful?

Burberry’s Current Position in the Marketplace

Burberry as a brand has positioned its brand over the years in the minds of customers as “functional luxury” brand. The company strives to maintain a strong and robust product line with presence of a great width and depth that consists of several products. All of its products basically fall into one of the two main groups i.e. either fashion or continuity category. Further, fashion products at Burberry are designed to be extremely responsive to the continuously changing fashion trends as well as are introduced based upon a collection-by-collection basis. Further, continuity products have a life cycle that is expected to last for a large number of years. Moreover, Burberry also possesses three primary and main collection ranges i.e. menswear, womenswear, and the accessories. With presence of so many types of products offered in various collections as well as the continuity vs. fashion of the Burberry products, the company’s product mix is extremely great and strong. This contributes to the complete positioning of the Burberry as a brand. Moreover, Burberry has even received several awards for the Contemporary Design Collection of the Year as well as the Classic Design Collection. This truly illustrates the completely diverse nature of the Burberry brand.

Thus, the market positioning for Burberry has always varied. It is truism that Burberry can easily appeal to the hip and trendy 25-year-old man or even, the conservative and old 65-year man. However, many of the Burberry ads feature only lot younger and good-looking models. Recently, Burberry ads have even been featuring everything from edger ads with models in bikinis to a classic British landscape with an aristocratic looking model. Considering all this, it can be easily said that Burberry is always targeted towards several different areas of the population with existence of a single common theme i.e. functional luxury.

Moving further, Burberry also has several industry competitors, which mainly include Polo, Coach, Armani as well as Gucci. Further, relative to it, Burberry’s competitors have now positioned themselves fairly well in the consumers’ minds. For example, the Coach primary positioning is on the handbags. Besides the fact that Coach even carries many other accessories, which range from the watches and shoes to dog collars and scarves, the brand primarily stays in the accessory end of the fashion world. Further, Coach was even not a player amongst the top 10 luxury players. However, Coach strongly held the 6% of accessories share as well as in a price comparison; it appeared to be more on the lower end of the cost for accessories. However, this does not in any sense reflect the Coach is marketing positioning. Additionally, Coach is simply a lot more affordable and a lot more accessible for the general population.