This month, Burberry marked its 170th anniversary with a campaign celebrating the signature trench. Shot by photographer Tim Walker, Portraits of an Icon features a star-studded line-up spanning Kate Moss, Little Simz, Kid Cudi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Teyana Taylor, and more. On the face, it is a classically Burberry campaign, centered on its most well-known product with the check print on full display, and a playful campaign video set to a Blur soundtrack. But the idea came about in an unconventional way.
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“I did an internal crowdsource to invite everyone to submit their ideas about how they would like to celebrate 170 years,” chief marketing officer Jonathan Kiman tells me. We’re sitting in his office at Burberry’s Westminster headquarters, surrounded by Burberry knights printed on pillow covers and coasters, on a bright Thursday morning following the brand’s Fall/Winter 2026 show. Kiman joined in September 2024, one of CEO Joshua Schulman’s first hires since his appointment two months prior. Kiman joined from Gucci, where he was CMO from 2022, promoted from SVP of brand strategy and marketing, and before that, chief brand officer at Versace for over a year.
Kiman had used the crowdsourcing strategy in a previous role, so decided to try it out at Burberry when he learned brand founder Thomas Burberry had once invited the public to submit ideas for what would become the knight emblem. Of over 500 submissions from employees, around 30 called for a talent-led trench campaign.
“We’ve played around with a lot of cinematic narratives, but this time, I felt we should probably do something a little bit more institutional to reflect the anniversary year,” he says. The trench, Kiman adds, offered a way to celebrate a cornerstone of Burberry’s past, while showing its relevance across generations and geographies. “It was also a signal [to employees] that the anniversary is going to be fun and celebratory, and everyone can get involved.”
It’s a timely celebration. After a decade of sluggish performance, Burberry sales and profitability have both improved significantly since the introduction of the Burberry Forward strategy in November 2024. Over the most recent two reporting periods, Burberry’s comparable store sales returned to growth, with Schulman stating that Kiman’s marketing strategy has directly contributed to sales.
Design changes or backend optimizations can take months to boost revenues, while marketing can spur an uplift within a matter of days. “That also becomes a bit of a pressure,” says Kiman. “We didn’t have the luxury of time; we needed to move fast.” That urgency translated to a department-wide mantra: don’t get stuck in the conference room. “Every campaign, every activation, every communications initiative became a moment to experiment and recalibrate,” he says.
New ways of working
If there was one core problem with Burberry’s marketing when Kiman arrived, it was a lack of claritys, he says. “We had so many subject-matter experts who were passionate about the brand and knew intuitively what Burberry should represent, but there was a disconnect between how you activate those teams and how you get them on a clear path,” Kiman explains. “If you look at the past decade at Burberry, there wasn’t necessarily a structure in place.”
That led Kiman and the wider business to develop a brand book that codifies everything from Burberry’s founder story, purpose, and values to its iconic products, symbols and logos, as well as the tone of voice for copy and imagery. “That’s been one of the biggest critical unlocks. Understanding the brand, the strategy, and then getting everyone working together around it,” he says. “As soon as the strategy was clarified, we were able to run at full speed, and that’s why we were able to experiment and move quite fast in marketing.”
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That claritys has extended beyond the marketing team. Kiman says design, merchandising, and marketing — the magic triad Schulman has referenced publicly — have reorganized and work much closer together closely. “There was a bit of that [team reorganization], which was super structured and corporate, about how we’re all going to meet and come together — and that was essential,” Kiman says. “But what was even more essential, for me, were the human relationships that started to develop. We would come together around lunches, Whatsapp groups, phone calls, talking things through to align on a vision and just having fun with it.”
One of the earliest decisions to come out of that closer collaboration was a clearer articulation of Burberry’s customer archetypes. Rather than over-indexing on the fashion-forward “opinionated” consumer, the brand has shifted toward a broader portfolio of customer groups including the high-spending “investor”, the classic “conservative”, the brand-loving “hedonist”, and the younger “aspirational” buyer. Those archetypes have fast spread through the rest of the company, Kiman says, and now shape the marketing calendar. “Once we mapped it out, our calendar became filled with all these initiatives tied to different customers, with all of us collectsively working across it all.” One example, he says, is choosing cultural themes with broader relevance — such as a music festival-inspired campaign that went live just before Glastonbury 2025, featuring frequenter Alexa Chung — when targeting young or aspirational audiences.
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That same logic applies to how Burberry measures the success of its marketing strategy. “It’s difficult for us to have one magic KPI, because each initiative is different. So when I joined and we needed to track the performance [of the new strategy], we developed a set of KPIs within three buckets,” Kiman explains. The first bucket is brand commerce, which measures how marketing supports commercial objectives, and is most relevant during the festive period. The second is brand buzz, short-term excitement about the brand, and the third is brand love, which is a mid to long-term driver of brand loyalty.
This thinking also shapes how the brand uses social media. “In luxury, people love to strive for the billboard or print, but the reality is [our brand] is mostly experienced through mobile devices and social platforms, and our teams have really embraced that,” says Kiman. Instead of creating content in parallel, the social team now has a standing spot in content review sessions, as well as a clearer role on-set. “Social has a big seat at the table when it comes to our campaigns. We don’t go to set if they’re not on the schedule,” says Kiman.
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Now, social teams have been brought into the development much earlier, which lends itself to more experimentation, particularly in short-form video. For the 170th-anniversary campaign, Burberry’s social team asked stars, including Jonathan Bailey and Kendall Jenner, questions such as the most British thing they’ve done, or advice for first-time visitors to London. The brand has also leaned into niche British TikTokers such as Bus Aunty (Bemi Orojuogun), who posed with a Burberry red bus (generating 11.2 million views), and Crazy Auntie Ann who pretend DJ’ed in her kitchen wearing Burberry check jacket (generating 12.4 million views). “There’s a whole curriculum for marketing degrees out there, then there’s this outstanding bit of work,” one commenter wrote.
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British luxury, marketed globally
Britishness sits at the center of Burberry’s positioning — but most of its customers aren’t British, and nor is Kiman, who grew up in the US. For him, the challenge is about calibrating between an imagined and a real version of Britain. “I’ve always been an outsider in my roles. Most people experience wanderlust — looking across borders and being inspired — and that is something that happens at a very young age,” he says. “You don’t feel that about your home market. Sometimes, you feel [a projection] is on the nose, but the fact I’ve lived in different cities lets me acknowledge that bias while leveraging it. We have to be really proud even about the postcard version of London and the UK that we’re projecting, and at the same time show we have insider knowledge.”
The marketing team has spent significant time defining what that actually means in practice, from romanticized visual references like the Big Ben and the British countryside, to globally recognized British talent such as Cara Delevingne and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, to softer cultural codes such as weather, wit, and humor. Humor, in particular, is one of the trickiest to get right. “It’s hard to tell a joke at the dinner table where everyone is going to laugh — and that’s our challenge when we lean into wit. Will everyone understand this?” says Kiman.
Some ideas never made it to consumers. In the early stages of the reset, projects were sometimes pulled late in the process if they didn’t quite land. “We had stumbling blocks with that early on, where we would talk to our regions and they would say, ‘We don’t understand what this joke is about,’” he says. “So now, if we’re playing with wit, it needs to be understandable — or we’ll give you the background story and the narrative to help it be digested.”
The key is to translate core storytelling about Britishness while ensuring it still resonates locally. “Before we could localize, we had to know what we were localizing,” Kiman says. “Our markets are very clear that they want us to show up as a British brand — that’s what they’re hungry for. They want those stories and those platforms from us, before they find smart ways to build the bridge locally.”
China was one of the first markets Kiman focused on. The region makes up around a third of sales and was Burberry’s best-performing region, with revenues up 6% in its most recent earnings (prior to the new strategy, performance in China was patchy). “I wanted a new approach — I wanted to work with local art directors, local agencies,” he says. Localization is less about copying campaigns and more about maintaining the spirit of the brand while adapting to cultural nuance, he says. “I’ve seen the copy-paste approach often fall flat. In the short term, it might work, but in the long term it can dilute the brand.”
That tension between immediate gains and long-term brand-building is one Kiman returns to repeatedly. For all the experimentation and iteration of the past 18 months, the broader goal remains consistency: building a version of timeless British luxury that resonates globally without losing its shape. “The customers will be the final judge,” he says.
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