How Mulberry’s in-house marketing team keeps creativity alive while boosting sales

Priya Matadeen: Marketers used to focus mainly on creativity and the creative process, but the role is evolving, and we now also have to demonstrate ROI and efficiency. I’m not just doing brand tracking from an awareness perspective; I’m tracking the funnel with our Chief Digital and Customer Officer. We’re defining ROI and very specific KPIs and metrics, and then translating that for the board in a way they’ll understand. That said, creativity is obviously still really key – especially in fashion and luxury – because beautiful images and the ability to translate why you’re buying this premium item into something that makes you feel and dream are essential.

PM: Social is now a central channel that demands speed, and sometimes the voices talking for the brand aren’t coming from you. So there’s a real need to control and maintain quality, even as speed increases. At the same time, social channels are far more measurable, so it’s easier to prove ROI.

Cross-channel thinking matters too. Out-of-home and press are less measurable, but in luxury, press remains crucial and out-of-home visibility is still essential. We need to measure this along the funnel – from awareness to conversion – in a way we didn’t need to 10 years ago. I’m lucky that my CEO acts as a true arbiter of brand. Most brands I’ve worked for place creativity at the core, and with Mulberry, we’re bringing creativity back to the centre. I’m excited to see how that evolves.

In advertising, I learned there’s a triangle: you can push for speed and quality, but it comes at a cost. That’s the big trade-off. I’ve learned this agency-side approach, but there has to be room for creative chaos. It’s not a linear process. I’m married to a creative who embodies that non linear process and it's so important to have space for that. The difficulty now is that, with the speed at which everything is produced, there isn’t always room for creativity to breathe. So we almost have to pick our battles. Some things we won’t have time for, and we need to be in a system that can ideate quickly. But there are certain things, like our campaign moments, where we do need more time, and we have to build that in and protect it.

PM: Continuing to stay true to your roots while bringing some level of unexpectedness is really key. I work closely with the in-house creative studio to execute our 'Back to the Mulberry Spirit' strategy. For Mulberry, this means we are embracing the duality in our behaviour and the balance of our heritage and ability to translate that into a modern approach. We look at all creative through this lens, and this is how the Cynthia Erivo and Tim Walker campaign was ideated, which I’ll talk about that later. It really means that creativity is central to Mulberry's core.

We closely monitor what’s going on in the rest of luxury and fashion, because we are a small pool of people with similar references including photographers and talent and there have been a few campaigns over the last year where two high-profile brands launched something at the same time, and the campaigns looked identical, with similar talents and poses. So that’s our biggest fear, because then our individuality and our whole USP and Mulberry Spirit start to waiver.

It’s really important to stay true to yourself, while thinking about the development of the Mulberry woman. How is this going to speak to a new audience, while captivating our current one? And for me, the deeper product story – why do they buy you, why will they pay an elevated price for you, do they understand the craft? We’ve been very careful within our model and price positioning to not become inaccessible, but to be more accessible luxury. I want to be able to pique interest, instead of our audience thinking, “Well, I’ve seen that before.” Marketing is the best way to communicate this.

PM: That campaign was activated in collaboration with in-house creative studio and really showcases the Mulberry Spirit strategy at its best as it created a true duality: the unexpected evolution of who the Mulberry woman is, in Cynthia, combined with our heritage-based codes and a longtime collaborator and friend of ours, Tim Walker, who has been shooting for us for the past 20 years. He brought a developed Mulberry language, because he understood us 20 years ago, but understands who we are now. And then, if you bring in an unexpected talent like Cynthia, and those two worlds collide and work, it creates an image where everyone goes, “oh gosh, what are they doing over there?” So I would say that kind of creativity sparked engagement – definitely on social. It drove traffic that we saw through both retail and digital. We can directly put it against that moment, and therefore that gives proof to people who aren’t that creatively driven, because they can look at the numbers and see that usually campaigns take a while to build, but that one flew straight away. And you could see it across the bottom line as well.

PM: When discussing this with our creative team, Cynthia embodied a duality that made her a no-brainer. She was a new type of woman for Mulberry, signifying who we are now, but she fundamentally understood 'why Mulberry' and had a lovely history with the brand. She felt very authentic to us yet unexpected. Cynthia is also quintessentially British. When you listen to her speak, she talks about how much she loves tea. And there are things that really speak to Mulberry heritage, and she speaks to quite a lot of that. But if you speak to a lot of people about Mulberry and why they love it and why they still want to see it succeed, it’s because it’s often their first bag, or their mum’s first bag. They borrowed it when they went to university, or it was their first bag going into the workplace. She still has that narrative, and she genuinely lives and breathes it. So for us, we’re not a brand with the largest budgets, and we didn’t want to go for a brand ambassador who was just doing a money job. We needed someone who really lived and breathed it. The way she speaks about us is quite authentic. She wanted to carry the bag. She wants to take it to premieres. It’s been a very beautiful, symbiotic relationship, I would say.

PM: The codes of luxury are often about the beauty of the product and the world surrounding the brand. It doesn’t always need a nuanced or highly conceptual idea; it needs to invite you into a world you can feel. I know that may sound a bit trite, but that’s the difference.

For example, a couple of years ago I was judging the Luxury category at D&AD, and the winning piece was a beautiful Chanel film, Coco Crush. For us in the jury room, the craft, the beauty, and the feeling it evoked – how it made you want to step into the Chanel world – was what mattered. It got all of us, regardless of background or region, to have a similar reaction. It wasn’t a heavily idea-led film, and we remember thinking that there might be other categories that wouldn’t get it. But that’s why luxury is important as a distinct category, because it does abide by separate rules and codes.