Burberry Kisses – Co-Creation at it’s finest

We’ve recently looked at the brand transformation of Burberry in our Internal Marketing studies, and although there was a brief mention of the digital strategies they’ve adopted (i.e. The Art of the Trench initiative), I wanted to focus on one of the more innovative, and frankly ingenious, campaigns they’ve run as of late.

Burberry Kisses was developed in conjunction with Google, the brief being that they wanted to “create an emotional connection between the Burberry brand and millennial consumers through the lens of beauty products.” To fully understand the concept behind the campaign, a quick watch of the following video will give you an idea of how it works, and why it has arguably set a new standard for digital marketing.

What we see from this campaign is a combination of co-creation efforts (namely co-experience and co-promotion), with a primary focus on humanising the perceptions of the Burberry brand. Not only do you get to send a ‘kiss’ to your loved one (and watch it being delivered using real Google Maps StreetView imagery), you also get to sample a select few Burberry lipstick colours in the process. The experience with the product comes secondary to the experience with the brand, and that’s where I’d argue the strength of this campaign lies. Given that Burberry is only just beginning to expand it’s presence in the cosmetics market, creating a brand-wide experience could be much more valuable than a single product experience. Once the Burberry customer has created an emotional connection with the brand, this connection has the potential to automatically transfer to other products, and contribute to the understanding of the brand as a whole.

Although the results of this campaign that have been shared publicly are quite modest (they only range a week from the initial launch), the innovation, and playful nature of this campaign, really serves as a great example of how brands can successfully humanise their digital marketing efforts, and create a message that is clearly (or literally in this case) ‘signed, sealed, and delivered’ to their customer.

Salil Kumar
Current student in the Master of Marketing program at the University of Sydney Business School