Emotionally engaging customers in the digital age: the case study of “Burberry love”

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how companies can design digital channels to evoke desired emotions. Design/methodology/approach – The successful business case of retailer Burberry has been examined to understand the strategy and customer engagement of digital channels implemented by decoding the emotional intensions. Findings – Results illustrate that the ability to create engaging interactions via digital channels with customers has a significant impact on growth, revenue and brand advocacy. Findings from this study provide a new empirical support for the proposition that emotions can be utilised to guide company digital strategy for building digital channel relationships with customers. Originality/value – This is the first study to examine the relationship between digital channels, emotion and customer responses to digital engagements. The inclusion of an emerging theory model is outlined to explain the successful process of reformulating business strategy through a dynamic and creative process of intersecting emotion, strategy and digital channels.

Emotional branding speaks to consumers’ heart: the case of fashion brands

“…Heritage is central to the brand's story, as told on social media and an augmented reality app targeting millennials. Burberry also uses RFID chips that turn mirrors in its stores into screens to engage customers in its brand story (Rose 2015;Straker and Wrigley 2016). As such, its brand narratives are reinforced with emotive, unique but consistent messages that appear in different channels (Straker and Wrigley 2016).…”

Determining Digital Transformation Success Factors

“…At organizational level, there is research sharing experiences, impacts, challenges and lessons learnt during DX journeys of such organizations [7,9,11,14,16,22,23,24,27]. Also, there is studies sharing transformation experiences at functional and operational levels of organizations [8,18,32,64].…”

“…In this process, rapid development and adoption of emerging digital technologies commonly known as SMAC change the business competition landscape by invading organizations and redrawing operating rules [38,39] as well as inventing new customer relationships, operations and business models [40,41,42]. This compels organizations to leverage these technologies to keep up with changing competitive playing field [1,19,43,44,45] and evolving requirements of today's digital savvy customer [8,11,16]. [11] argues that digital transformation affects all organizations across all industries, warning organizations that wish to remain relevant in their market sectors to leverage the digital opportunities and transform.…”

The design movement: Two case studies from the edge of the discipline

“…The findings from this research have clarified and defined digital channels, identifying a hierarchical relation among them (typologies) (Straker, Wrigley, & Rosemann, 2015b). In particular the findings provide an understanding of how successful implementation of emotional awareness can occur within an organization via a process of collecting and analyzing customers' emotions (Straker & Wrigley, 2016a, 2016b. The sum of these findings assists in building an understanding of emotions and their role in designing digital channel engagements.…”