“Our insight is rendered pretty useless if we can’t put it into the hands of the decision-makers”
Daragh Kelly, VP of Data and Analytics at Burberry
Creativity sits at the heart of Burberry and has guided the brand since it opened its doors more than 166 years ago. By using creativity to unlock imagination and push boundaries, Burberry has earned its reputation as one of Britain’s most iconic and sought-after brands.
But, as the fashion landscape has changed, so has the need to harness data and insights.
Burberry has been one of the first out of the luxury fashion gate to embrace this opportunity and become more insights-led - making better decisions, faster. The business has partnered with Stravito, to create The Burberry Insight Hub, a dedicated insight engagement platform, hosting all of the brand’s consumer, product and external market & competitor insights.
Ross Dempsey who leads the Insight Engagement Program at Burberry, explains, “Whilst Burberry is, and will always be, creatively-led, we are on a mission to ensure insight is injected into the business and its decision- making process.”
Becoming a Learning Organization
Like many global organizations, before the introduction of The Hub, Burberry’s insight often sat in silos and was difficult to access. This, in turn, created inefficiency for teams both producing and consuming insight. And, crucially, slowed down both day-to-day and high-level strategic decision-making.
Whilst Burberry had a well-developed digital landscape, using tools like SharePoint and OneDrive to store general knowledge, it needed a bespoke solution to activate insight engagement.
“The nature of the information we share is complex so storing it in one place was never going to be good enough to drive engagement. Instead, it risked becoming lost, forgotten and, buried in a folder somewhere. We needed an interactive consumer-grade experience,” says Ross.
Designed specifically for Burberry’s time-poor corporate audience, The Burberry Insight Hub combines AI with a user-friendly experience to bring insight to the fingertips of employees. No convoluted manuals or training is required. Similarly to personal apps such as Netflix and Spotify, the content Stravito surfaces is personalized to each individual based on their market, industry, language, job title, location, behavior and other signals. This ensures key insights are delivered to the appropriate employees at the appropriate time.
Already, The Insights Hub has received high acclaim from Burberry’s Senior Leadership Team.
Daragh Kelly, VP of Data and Analytics at Burberry, comments:
“Despite being a time-poor audience, our stakeholder appetite for insight has never been greater. That means we have to be efficient in how we manage access to and, crucially, distribute our knowledge. In short, the Hub is an essential foundation for the insight function that is delivering efficiency gains for the business by turning our insights into reusable assets.”
Rachel Waller, VP of Channel Innovation, Marketing, adds:
“It is critical we get our insights into the hands of our teams and decision-makers. Indeed, with the added context of Covid-19, a more complex and competitive luxury landscape and achieving our ambitious ‘big bets’, it’s essential that we get more efficient at democratizing access to insight and breaking down knowledge silos. The Burberry Insight Hub enables us to centralize, curate and distribute insight from across the business at scale, and quickly. That’s hugely powerful and a great example of modern knowledge management, which in turn helps us to develop as a learning organization.”
The Journey to Choosing Stravito
Before implementing Stravito, Burberry carried out an extensive build or buy analysis.
“Stravito was a very good partner from a development standpoint,” says Ross. “The product roadmap showed a granular understanding of Insights Teams’ needs, and matched our ambitions and direction.
“Stravito’s feature set and user experience showed a focus on – and understanding of – both insights users and their internal customers. The pricing was simple and competitive. And, Stravito’s technical knowledge was very good - any questions we had were robustly answered.
“Ultimately, it was clear from the outset that Stravito would dedicate time to ensuring a successful roll-out and wider adoption, and would continue to support the insights team with best practices and practical input on an ongoing basis.”
Establishing an Insights Narrative
Placing insights in one place has allowed Burberry to move further toward a single source of truth within the organization, achieving clarity and a common thread through The Hub - which has quadrupled its volume of insights in 12 months.
To truly activate insight engagement throughout, The Burberry Insight Hub also serves as a curated Live Newsroom that delivers timely collections of insight across Burberry. The live insights hub not only allows Burberry to distribute insight at scale, and quickly. But, more importantly, it delivers consumable and timely insights that help create a narrative around insight focused on key business topics.
On a weekly basis, Ross, who is Editor-in-Chief of the platform, delivers collections of insight directly to the inbox of Burberry’s corporate business via a range of established dedicated insight comms channels. These include The Drop, a flagship insight newsletter, a variety of insight promos, as well stand-alone editorial features, Q&As, insight podcasts, and more.
To maximize awareness, Burberry then shares these insights with its 3000-strong corporate arm via a Yammer integration.
Using Yammer to Increase Engagement
“At Burberry, Teams and Yammer are used extensively, so we created our own Yammer Community for the Burberry Insight Hub. This acts as a live newsroom where I distribute internal hero insights and comms such as The Drop but also share breaking competitor market intelligence and trade press.
By sharing insights via Yammer, Burberry has been able to increase engagement and adoption of the Burberry Insight Hub. Our Yammer Alerts regularly receive upwards of 2500 impressions from our 3000-strong audience.
“Through Yammer, we’re able to have a two-way conversation with our audience - we can post questions and leverage their collective intelligence. For example, I may share news on a hot industry topic such as the Metaverse and what others are doing there.
“It’s a great way to spark creativity and reach an audience outside the hub, drawing them in to seeing how their decision-making could be influenced by insights, and ultimately turn them into regular hub users.”
The success of Burberry's Insights Newsroom is evident. In the past six months, the platform has grown 35% to 1400 users and has the potential to more than double.
Fueling Adoption and Better Business Decisions
“Existing usage has also remained consistently high with the total number of document views per month tripling since launch.”
“The user experience, functionality, and consultative support from Stravito have really combined to drive high adoption of the platform,” says Ross.
He adds, “Over the past year, Stravito has continued to collaborate with us to support our approach to driving insight deeper and faster throughout the business. Together, we’ve grown the number of people interacting with insights month by month, and ultimately the influence of the insights team.”
Already, the insights driven by The Burberry Insight Hub are having a direct impact on business campaigns, driving better business decisions.
“The branding and marketing team, in particular, have taken to The Hub quickly. They upload all of their own content, and see it as an excellent way to promote their own work using the Hub as a mouthpiece into the wider business,” says Ross.
For the first time, Burberry has all in its insight in one place, easily searchable and shareable. This has enabled the business to find, digest and act upon insight faster than ever before. The platform plays an integral role in distributing key insight on business priorities, directly informing key projects on everything from Sustainability, our Digital Ambition, global Brand performance, as well as key calendar moments such as the Festive trading period.
Crucially though, The Insight Hub has also allowed Burberry to democratize all of its market intelligence, which previously was not available to all of the business.
“Through the Insight Hub, we have a Market Intelligence Collection, which can now be accessed by all users - no additional subscriptions required,” explains Ross. “Removing barriers like this through Stravito’s technology, not only reduces the risk of duplicate spend on research, but has created an environment where individuals now want to, and are even expected to, share market research widely.”
Looking Ahead to Insights-Driven Creativity
Burberry’s plans to increase insight-driven creativity show no signs of slowing.
“We’ve spent the past year building the platform together with Stravito, and establishing our audience,” says Ross. “Looking ahead into year two, we want to further encourage repeat usage. To achieve this, we’re implementing an exciting roadmap of platform developments and integrations, evolving our insight storytelling and focusing on our end users.”
Through the insight newsroom and insight comms channels, Burberry will better maximize insight value by establishing a shared insight narrative across teams, countries and markets. It’s this type of actionable insight that will help Burberry to better understand its customers, fuel innovation, launch better products and campaigns, and further improve its brand.
