Let’s go clubbing!

Companies usually employ marketing teams to come up with strategies for building bonds with their customers. These strategies are almost always top-down. However, sometimes something special happens and the bonds between provider and customer develop spontaneously, bottom-up, helping to create a community of shared interests around the service or product in question.
This is what is happening now at Catalonia Today, as a process that began some months ago comes to fruition. The thousands of interactions through our web site, our podcasts, our Facebook page or our Twitter account suggested that something special was going on; a community of people linked by the English language was growing around our magazine.
The result of this interaction was that the readers and subscribers began to put forward new ideas for enriching this community that was developing. One example was the initiative to convince the managers of the Ocine cinemas to schedule films in original version in differents places around Catalonia. This idea came from the community and we at the magazine supported it and helped make it happen. Another example was when a group of readers and subscribers from the Escola Oficial d’Idiomes, who had been meeting in reading groups for a while, suggested that we spread their idea and help create more reading groups around Catalonia.
Ideas like these are what planted the seeds for the ECClub, the first English Culture Club in Catalonia, which was officially launched last month in Barcelona by its Honorary President, the English writer, Tom Sharpe. The presentation was in the huge Acabus bookstore on carrer Còrsega. We are delighted to have Abacus on board, the largest cooperative in Catalonia, with more than 750.000 members.
ECClub is now up and running and we hope it snowballs to offer ever more events and resources in English to its membership, all based around the ECClub Reading Groups. We want all our readers and subscribers to take advantage of the club, so don’t hesitate to visit http://www.cataloniatoday.cat/ or www.abacus.coop/catalonia-today and learn how you can be a part of this growing family.