How Do Heritage Brands Transfer Their Brand Identity While Transitioning From A Complex To A Simple Visual Identity?: A Burberry Case Study

Sammanfattning: Brands in the fashion industry are currently going through extensive changes in their visual expressions. Logos are being redesigned to appear more simplistic and are leaving behind their complex and well-established design. For heritage brands, that rely heavily on their past as part of their branding, it is a challenge to maintain their brand identity while moving from a complex to a simple visual identity. On these premises, the study aims to determine if a coherent transition from one visual ex-pression to another is occurring during rebranding. Using the Burberry brand as a case study, and building on Barthes’ semiotic system and Kristeva’s intertextuality, an analysis of the brand’s visual expressions will be conducted. The four different Burberry logos, alongside with variations, were put under the scope of the study. The findings demonstrated that references to the brand’s core values, as well as refer-ences to previous visual expressions, are essential to keep a cohesion and coherence with the brand identity. Further research could go beyond the scope of the fashion in-dustry, to corroborate or supplement the findings of this research.