Fluevog Shoes have customers feeling so cool they're designing shoes + ads

From a loyalty perspective, understanding that some of your best, most ardent customers also represent a talent pool, and rewarding them with an opportunity to help propagate an open brand, is clever shoes indeed.

Starting in Canada, Fluevog Shoes and their fiercely individualistic vision have been around for 40 years now. The brand sure gets their target consumers' self-image, and does a particularly spirited job of enhancing it, too. Using co-founder John Fluevog as the nucleus, their loyalty strategy draws customers into an inner circle of hipster culture with irresistible hooks for the urban extrovert at every turn.

From pithy thoughts from the man himself, such as, “Be deeply funky,” to eNewsletters with subject lines like, “Why John thinks you're awesome,” and “.000000000000118% of the people in the world are Fluevogers,” the Fluevog ethos is cheerfully exclusive and inclusive at the same time.

Insightfully, they've also tapped into the inherent creativity of their fashion-forward fans by running not one but two ongoing participatory promotions.

The first is Open Source Footwear, where anyone is invited to contribute a shoe design. Votes are welcome from all, and some designs – or elements of designs – are selected for production. There is no compensation, since the ‘open source' model defines all contributions to be in the public domain, but there is exposure in the form of a bio.

The second is FlueovogCreative, inviting submissions for print ad ideas. Again, voting determines the faves, and the winning ads run in magazines with a promised minimum circ of 250,000. Winners also receive a $1,000 Fluevog gift certificate.

Does your brand, or the brand you work for, have such an insight at its heart?