As Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts moves to Apple, what's in store for these much admired brands?
Rachelle Headland, managing director at shopper marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi X, looks at what Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts' move to Apple will mean for both brands.
Angela Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey
Big news in the world of retail: Burberry chief executive Angela Ahrendts will be leaving the iconic British luxury goods firm next year to join Apple as its SVP of retail. Ms Ahrendts has been with Burberry for almost 10 years and has been credited with turning the fashion house into one of the UK's most successful luxury brands at home and abroad. She hands over the responsibility to Christopher Bailey, Burberry's chief creative officer for the past six years.
According to the BBC, the move is potentially linked to Apple's development of an "iWatch". The rumour makes sense as Apple would obviously be keen for someone who can help blend an understanding of fashion with the technology and engineering behind the product. Enter the woman that drove that very same cultural shift at Burberry.
Indiana-born Ahrendts, in partnership with Christopher Bailey, focused on five strategic areas for Burberry, including leveraging the franchise, intensifying accessories and accelerating retail-led growth. At the same time, Ahrendts famously shifted Burberry’s flagship fashion show back to London and drove the much-revered technological push to immerse shoppers in the products and also to connect people with the brand.
At the same time Apple has also been revered for the way it has changed the experience of buying technology, by tapping into the human love of creativity, exploration and lovely looking things, all the way through to its retail experience. So there are definitely synergies for Ahrendts as she moves to Apple, and great opportunities too for Bailey as he takes Burberry through to the next generation of shoppers.
Digital innovation will undoubtedly continue to remain at the heart of both brands, but beyond product innovation and brand immersion in-store, Ahrendts and Bailey will probably both now take advantage of the Lovemark status of their brands and socialise not just their equity, but most probably the shopping experience itself. You’ll be sending more than a kiss to your friends, you’ll be joining the respective brands’ army of advocates.
And to ensure socialising their brand equity doesn’t undermine or drive off course the Burberry or Apple brands, I’ve no doubt Ahrendts will bring her fashion expertise in to play for Apple with carefully selected ambassadors from the upper classes and the fashion-forward to provide both the force-field and the allure in the same way securing Romeo Beckham, the 10-year-old son of Victoria and David Beckham for the December 2012 Burberry campaign, was a coup no one could have predicted.
And this is what great brands are all about - stories, legends even. In September 2009 Burberry turned its back on Milan Fashion Week, and embraced its true home, London. In June 2013 the Burberry menswear show arrived at London Collections: with a celebrity front row. With Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino shooting its ad campaigns, Christopher Bailey has always played a part in hand-picking the models. In the beginning there were home-grown beauties such as Kate Moss and Lily Donaldson. Burberry found Cara Delevingne and helped Emma Watson rid herself of her Harry Potter character. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley became the very public body of the brand's new scent, Body, when she posed in just a trench coat and the brand also launched its cosmetics line with beautiful British faces. You now know when a Burberry show is about to take place, as the stars start descending upon the capital.
Ahrendts and Bailey took all the kernels of truth behind the product, and the heritage of the brand, and used it to create a new, glittering Burberry brand world. In the same way that the Burberry catwalk shows always climax with a pouring of petals, glitter or tinsel, we have all been fashionably rained upon by this brand, and have a new perception of British urban glamour.
To ensure the experience of buying the brand was as much of a statement as the experience of owning a Burberry trenchcoat, Burberry’s 44,000 sq ft store on London's Regent Street opened in 2013 with no cash registers. Items are instead chipped with radio-frequency identification technology so that multimedia content relevant to the product is triggered when an item is placed near a mirror. The store also has a hydraulic stage, to host intimate gigs by the likes of Jake Bugg and the Kaiser Chiefs.
This is what’s in store for us as the high street transforms and using technology to purchase becomes as natural as breathing.
The technology is not there for the convenience of the transaction; it is there to connect you in a meaningful way to the brand by opening up a world you want to have direct access to and immerse yourself in. This is why Burberry has been so successful, and it will be up to Bailey to continue to forge this emotional connection between the brand and the shopper and for Apple to inject more of this mystery, sensuality and intimacy into the experience of buying its products.