Enter fashion retailer Club Monaco, which late last week soft-launched a Facebook application that lets fans incorporate select moments from Club Monaco's Timeline onto theirs. The idea, Ann Watson, VP of marketing and communications at Club Monaco, tells Mashable, is to enable the brands and its fans to celebrate "shared cultural and social moments."
"We have a loyal fan base whom we grew up with and so these are not only our memories but they are also theirs," she explains. Club Monaco was founded in 1985 and acquired by Polo Ralph Lauren 14 years later.
Conceptually, the app is brilliant, and I expect many other brands will create their own editions of it. What I think could be improved is the selection of moments themselves.
First, there are a lack of true "moments," outside of a handful of store openings and campaign shoots. Most of the moments are just things -- a souffle, the name of a band, a picture of a restaurant. Where do they belong on my Timeline?
Second, the moments that are in fact "moments" are too heavily branded. Sure, there might be a few diehard Club Monaco fans who would add a store opening to their Timelines, but the app would, I believe, prove more popular if it allowed you to share big, iconic moments in cultural history that still align with the brand: the release of a certain album, the staging of a certain protest, the opening of an art exhibit everyone was talking about.
But I could be off the mark. Watson's remarks lead me to believe the initiative is less about increasing Club Monaco's reach on Facebook, and more about celebrating its history with its core fans. The company plans to add more moments for them to share over time.