Cartier joins MySpace in an appeal to young consumers

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: On MySpace, the social networking website, the rock band Panic at the Disco has 1.4 million friends. Coldplay has 4,67,000 friends. Paris Hilton has 1,78,000 friends and Madonna has 3,97,000.

As for Cartier, the luxury jeweler, it has more than 3,800 friends, including Sting, the band Good Charlotte and Lou Reed. And while the sincerity of these friendships is questionable—when was the last time that Eric Clapton sent Cartier a birthday card, or vice versa?—they send a message that Cartier cares about people who spend their time on MySpace.

“To work in the luxury environment, it means being a step in advance sometimes,” said Corinne Delattre, director of communications at Cartier. “We work with people moving fast. They use technology. They are ahead in their way of life.”

Actually, many expensive brands have been slow to move to the Internet more generally, let alone to freewheeling frontiers like social networking. Some however have “fan pages” on Facebook, which allow people to post videos of themselves wearing their favourite designers’ fashions, for example.

Though ad spending on MySpace has trailed expectations, the company thinks it has solved some of the problem, with the Cartier campaign serving as a model. Ben Hourahine, futures editor at the London branch of the advertising agency Leo Burnett, said the use of social networks was appropriate at a time when consumer attitudes about luxury were changing. “Luxury brands in the past had this unattainable aspect to them,” he said. “Now they realise they need to connect and communicate with people.”