The SMM of Burberry and Hermes

By İçerik Ustası

Monday, March 5, 2018

Burberry is often labelled as the top digital luxury brand. It launched its Facebook page in 2009 and was thus one of the first luxury brands that is using social networking.  It currently has over 17 million fans on its Facebook page. The brand updates its statutes and posts contents on daily basis and thus seeks to engage customers. Some of the contents it posts include live streams of its runway shows, advertisements, presentations of its products, campaigns, acoustic tracks performed and recorded exclusively for Burberry (part of its Burberry Acoustic project), presenting the newest collections, make-up tutorials, footages from catwalk, behind the scenes content, important events and dates for the company, store openings, and announcements, and so forth. This variety of content manages to keep its fans entertained. The proof of this high level of engagement is the number of likes, comments and shares. The number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on the Burberry Facebook page can reach few thousands (see Appendix 2).

On the other hand, Hermes’ SMM appears to be significantly less engaging. This brand has considerably less fans on its Facebook page and posts contents very rarely. The last post on its Facebook fan page was on 28. June. Table 3 summarises the SMM of both brands on the basis of several variables: number of fans, frequency of posts, and level of engagement. As shown in the table Burberry’s SMM is significantly stronger than that of Hermes and this is also reflected on the level of fans’ engagement.  Burberry delivers relevant, interesting and varied content that captures not only the personality and exclusivity of the brand but the attention of the fans as well.

The number of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’ clearly acknowledges the high level of consumer engagement that Burberry creates on its Facebook fan page. On the basis of these figures, we can make few assumptions that will later be tested by drawing upon the data collected with the online questionnaires. Considering that Burberry’s marketing activities on Facebook are significantly more engaging that the marketing activities of Hermes we can assume that Burberry’s consumer brand equity will be much stronger than the brand equity of Hermes. More precisely, considering that the present study conceptualises and measures the concept of brand equity through 6 different dimensions (see Table 2) we assume that:

-          Burberry’s Facebook activities will have a greater influence on awareness of the brand than Hermes’ activities;

-          Burberry’s Facebook activities will have greater influence on perceived quality, value and uniqueness of the brand than Hermes’ activities;

-          Burberry’s Facebook activities will have greater influence on brand imagery and performance related associations than Hermes’ activities;

-          Burberry’s Facebook activities will have greater influence on evaluations of brand quality and brand consideration than Hermes’ activities;

-          Burberry’s Facebook activities are more likely to evoke favourable emotions of social approval, self-respect and excitement among fans than Hermes’ activities;

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