Brand hijack

Perhaps it can be safely assumed that one place where image is everything is in the luxury goods market. So what are the implications when a carefully constructed brand, like Burberry, goes completely off-radar? Richard Brass reports

Tricky things, brands. A huge, elaborate industry has grown up around them, rigorous scientific methods, meticulous research and sophisticated social and psychological analysis are applied to them and countless professionals have made a great deal of money by touting their expertise at making them do exactly what companies want. But once in a while, like naughty children, brands ignore everything they’ve been told and run completely out of control.

Nobody knows this better than Rose Marie Bravo. Hired from Saks in the US to rescue the ailing British fashion house Burberry in 1997, she worked a miracle, transforming a dying brand most often seen among pensioners at the post office into one of the hottest properties in town. She made Burberry’s trademark camel, red and black check a symbol of the upmarket and the cool that was seen in all the best places, from the most glamorous nightclubs to Kate Moss’ bikini. Turnover doubled, profits soared and the pattern originally designed in the 1920s was back in business.

But then, in its home market, the brand went completely off-message. After being spotted as the design of choice of one or two minor celebrities known mostly for drug-taking and random parenting, the Burberry check was suddenly adopted as a tribal badge by a section of the British population that has never registered on any upmarket brand marketeer’s radar.

Defined by Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary simply as “the lower class” or “uneducated and ignorant people”, the phenomenon of the “chav” has exploded in the last couple of years in the UK from a localised and occasional form of abuse to a widely used label for a group of people interested in chunky gold jewellery, white trainers, alcohol, fast cars and not much else. The label can’t quite be classed as a demographic, being roughly equivalent to the US term “trailer trash” and regarded by many, including Burberry’s creative director Christopher Bailey, as snobbish and patronising, but the existence of the group is hard to dispute.

Even harder to dispute is the fact that, from the moment the term was coined, it was linked with Burberry. Baseball caps, mobile phones, nail polish, babies’ buggies, car upholstery - in the chav community the Burberry check, genuine or counterfeit, began appearing on any spare surface. Even the nastiest of soccer hooligans, the real hard core who never wear their team colours so that they can evade the police and infiltrate their opponents, adopted Burberry as a badge of the seriously violent. While outside Britain the name Burberry usually still means elegant, upmarket and cool, in Britain it has become almost universally connected with a phenomenon characterised by ignorance, meanness, poverty and crime.

The effect of the chav association on Burberry’s business showed up in at least one quarter’s set of figures last year when, reporting a slowdown in sales growth, the finance director admitted that the chav connection had “not been helpful”, but the company has remained generally tight-lipped about this unplanned appropriation of its brand and its name. Its response has been to ignore the hijacking and sit it out until either the chav phenomenon or its taste for the trademark check passes.

But then, last September, the brand’s image suffered another blow when Kate Moss, a regular in Burberry’s advertising whose appearance in a check bikini had, according to Bravo, cut the average age of the company’s customers by 30 years, was caught taking cocaine. This further identification of Burberry with unacceptable behaviour followed the announcement by the company’s parent, Great Universal Stores, that it was selling its 66% share in Burberry to GUS’ own shareholders, a move which has been interpreted by some observers as indicating a lack of confidence in the company’s prospects.

With Bravo due to step down in July, her successor, fellow American Angela Ahrendts, faces a big challenge to put the company back on a firm footing in its home market in the face of not only these troubles but also the unexpected resignation of Burberry’s President and chief operating officer in November. On paper at least, Ahrendts appears to have what it takes. Having turned Juicy Couture, a subsidiary of Liz Claiborne, into the favourite of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, and then mapped out new areas of growth for Liz Claiborne itself, she comes with the same hard-nosed American reputation as Bravo herself.

And, chavs aside, there are plenty of positives. Bravo is leaving the company’s finances in a healthy state. The chav problem is limited to the UK, which accounts for less than 10% of the company’s sales. And the launch of the company’s upmarket catwalk range, Prorsum, has been so successful among both consumers and the fashion press that Christopher Bailey was named Designer of the Year at the prestigious British Fashion Awards last November.

Marc Cohen, director of luxury goods research and strategy consultancy Ledbury Research, says the successful launch of Prorsum has helped to shore up Burberry’s image in the UK market. “They’ve launched Prorsum as a more exclusive range for high-spending customers, which has enabled the brand to retain some premium positioning,” he says. “They’ve also reined in their licensing and made the distinctive check a far more subtle part of their clothing lines - for example as the inside lining of a coat.

Nonchalance

“The brand has also really focused on ‘true British style’ and stressing the importance of its heritage. They have also, apart from one rather high-profile gaffe, put on an air of nonchalance about the problem, presuming rightly that the fashion amongst ‘chavs’ will pass eventually.

“Their decision to launch fragrances for men and women called Burberry Brit is a seemingly curious one. It appears slightly to celebrate the chav phenomenon. But this is probably reasonably clever. Why miss out on all that money from what is a sizeable customer segment? At least chavs and D-list celebrities photographed for magazines can’t be seen wearing a scent.”

Although Burberry is the most high-profile case of brand hijacking, it is far from alone. It’s a particular problem in the luxury goods market, where persuading consumers that yours is an exclusive product fit only for the select few must be balanced with the need to shift enough units to keep the shareholders happy, creating the paradoxical situation where the more you sell the worse it is for your brand. Using price to keep the riffraff out and the wealthy in is clearly not always successful.

“It’s interesting that Hackett is now suffering from the same problem as Burberry,” says Marc Cohen. “Prada trainers have also recently been reported to have been banned from some nightclubs. Coach, initially the poster child for affordable luxury in the US, is now seen as quite downmarket domestically. Marks & Spencer lost their prestige in its home market. And Mercedes in the UK has suffered considerably in the past few years, often blamed by some commentators upon its decision to provide its A-Class model for the fleet of easyrentacar.com.”

The fact that Burberry is in such auspicious company is unlikely to provide much comfort to Angela Ahrendts. The company may generally be doing well, winning awards and moving forward but, like any good parent, she won’t be happy until the errant child is back home where it belongs.

Richard Brass is a freelance columnist and feature writer.