What other brands can learn from the Courvoisier Future 500

As Helga said “shame they used models for the cover shot” (ahem) that’ll be me top left then…

Last week I was picked as one of the top 5 in the Future 500 , which is sponsored by Courvoisier (the brandname-dropping becomes relevant), with a pretty amazing piece of print that went out with every copy of the Observer nationally, meaning about 1.5 million people at least glanced at a copy whilst recycling it.

Aside from the promo just being generally great, these guys have put together a social network to connect up with others who are in the list.

Quite obviously, Courvoisier have realised that they have to keep refreshing their image and relevance for each generation of people who might be their customers, and given that their whole brand proposition is about opulence and quality it seems like they’ve made quite a smart move by doing this campaign for the second year. Basically, it may be expensive but what they are banking on is connecting with some very smart and talented people (as well as jokers like me) and basically associating their brand with them and their networks.

The step on from organising a good party or two like other brands though, is that they’ve quite smartly put together a social networking site , using the freely available Ning.com service. 4IP have adopted it as their platform of choice for basic social networking tools. Think of it as roll your own Facebook .

It’s invitation only, meaning that only people who’ve been in the list can join, and once on there you can connect with them, suggest collaborations and so on. The thing is, that because this is a free service that they’ve used, the ration of expense to them ongoing versus the benefit to the members is amazing. They can invite us to events they are hosting without sending out loads of printed invites. They can give us special offers and guarantee that several of us will take them up. They like it, we like it, everyone wins.

Effectively, what they’ve created is a tool to generate “good will via association”. Every time something good happens through the network, we might associate it with their brand, and think more postively about it.

I’ve already made some great contacts through the site (no I’m not being paid for this) and hopefully there’ll be more where that came from.

I think there’s a lot to be learned by other luxury brands in this time of economic downturn. It’ll be those brands that innovate quickly and find smart ways like this to connect with their market that will do well. They’ve obviously ‘got it’ that people want more for their brand loyalty, things that go beyond discount deals, special offers and competitions. We want opportunities to connect with other people that think the same way as us. By basically targetting smart young entrepreneurial types and offering them something valuable, they’ll be getting a lot more back in return in my opinion.

At first I felt very uncomfortable about associating with a brand I new little about, but once that wore off, and I took the whole thing at face value I started to see what they were doing and more than accepting it, I felt pretty honoured to be in amongst a group of amazing people.

Anyone have examples of other brands doing similar things?