Leading Digital_ Turning Technology into Business Transformation ( PDFDrive )

32 LEADING DIGITAL
developing Tweetwalk, live-stream fashion shows, with Twitter;
Âcollaborating with Google to create Burberry Kisses, allowing users to
capture and send their “kiss” to anyone in the world; 6 and partnering
with Chinese social media platform WeChat in the autumn/winter
2014 runway show to launch a series of mobile content experiences.
Empowered by a closely connected, creative thinking culture, the company
used digital technologies to share the excitement of key brand
moments with its worldwide customers.
At the same time, Burberry’s retail investment was keeping pace—
opening twenty to thirty new stores a year. How could the company use
digital innovation to engage its customers seamlessly in its physical real
estate as well as online? This is where Burberry’s retail-theater concept
came into play. Ahrendts explained: “We began to partner with technology
companies to make the ‘retail theater’ concept real, enabling us
to broadcast our multifaceted content to our stores globally. We used
technology to bring our brand to life in our stores: from the music to
the rich video content on giant internal and external screens to the
iPads carried by all sales associates that gave access to the full global
collection regardless of what was available in-store. We invited our customers
to watch our runway shows live in stores and enabled them to
shop the collection on iPads immediately afterwards for delivery in six
to eight weeks. In this way, we have developed our stores to showcase
our digital innovations.” 7
Prior to this wave of digital innovations, Burberry had spent several
years implementing a backbone enterprise platform to consolidate its
systems and make its global operations transparent. It was critical for
the company to have a single view of the customer in order to improve
the experience across all channels, media, and platforms. “Had we not
put that in place,” Ahrendts said, “we would not have been able to do
so much of the front-end digital innovation we have been doing.” 8 The
company also made big investments in customer service not only by
training salespeople in stores, but also on its website, where customers
can click to call or click to chat with customer service representatives
365 days a year, 24/7, and in fourteen languages. 9