The team that came up with the Enjoy card member programme knows what it's like to make it in the China market. From pipe dream to household name, they're living the success story

---By Jody Braverman

If you live in Shanghai - and you aren't a hermit - chances are you've heard of the Enjoy card. Up and running for nearly three years now, the benefits programme promoting the best dining, drinking and shopping venues in China will have more than 25,000 members in Shanghai alone this year. One-third of the triplet that started Enjoy China, Daniel Borin sees this number growing considerably in the next few years. That's a matter of course. A discount card and vouchers for free items totaling around RMB50,000 means great value for the members who paid a slim RMB299 to join. And don't be surprised if you see Daniel out on the town - everywhere, every night. It's part of the job. As the self-titled "taste tester", he has the tough job of scouting out the best restaurants, bars and shops in Shanghai and greater China. Poor Daniel.

Where did the concept for the Enjoy card come from?

It's not a new idea. There are similar things around the world. One of the biggest examples is the Entertainment Guide, which, I guess the best way to describe it is kind of like a coupon book which entitles you to get benefits, some of which are similar to what we offer. They have it in the States, in Australia and elsewhere.

How did you get involved?

It began in Shanghai. Aaron Landis, who had originally thought up with the idea for the company, had come up from Hong Kong just before SARS in 2003. I started helping out Aaron, just to see what it was all about. We visited a few places we'd picked out as being the best in Shanghai, trying to sell it. I kind of struck it lucky and closed the first customer I had, and from there it progressed.

What were you doing before?

I'd just come off the boat from Australia, basically. I came with two suitcases and that was it. My plan was to get up to speed with Shanghai, and then work it out. I jumped on a plane and met a friend at the airport in Shanghai. She took me directly to dinner and then to Park 97 on a Wednesday night. I met about 40 people on that first night. That was my introduction to Shanghai nightlife, and for a Wednesday night I was really impressed. I was out all the time every night meeting people, talking about what's going on in Shanghai, establishing a network.

How does the card work?

The voucher offer is a once-off use. You tear it out of the booklet, you go to a place and you can enjoy a special benefit. The voucher offers are very high value, usually over a hundred, up to a thousand, renminbi. The card on the other hand is more of a loyalty benefit. So as a member you frequent these establishments and they want to encourage you to frequent them more.

How do the partner venues benefit? From a business perspective they really want to give a lot of incentives to get customers to try their establishment. So it's basically a very targeted incentive to capture new customers - that's the idea of the new voucher. Because of that, they are willing to give very high value benefits. We put out a member survey every year to ask how they're finding their membership with Enjoy. What kind of effect does it have on them? There's two things, there's the loyalty effect - we've asked our members if they get a special benefit somewhere does that incentivize them to go there more? Actually, 95 percent of people say they're likely to frequent a venue more often because they're getting a benefit there.

What else encourages members to frequent Enjoy venues?

I guess it's two things; one of them is because they get a special offer there, and second is that it's something that Enjoy has recommended to them. We have a certain quality level which we are quite strict about when we're looking at which partners to work with, and we like to keep that level high - it signifies to the members when they see our sign, a sticker on the door, or a placard on the wall that 'I guess this is recommended by Enjoy and as such it should be of a certain quality level.' While we think that what we're putting together is a very good benefits package, actually 39 percent of our members say the most important thing about their membership is that they get information on the best places. So they may not necessarily be interested in getting a benefit, but they want to read about where the best restaurants are here, where's the best shop, and so forth. So I guess is almost like a guide as well.

How did you get Enjoy's name out in the beginning?

It was tough. We're a self-funded company - we didn't have the kind of budget where we could afford to do full-page ads every week in the magazines. We started off with back pages of that's Shanghai, we had a launch party. I think one of the best channels to get our name out there was the couple-of-hundred-strong network of venues that we have. They're also distributors of our product, they put out POS displays, little cards and commercial stuff for us. That is really hitting the right market for us. We've thrown a few big-scale parties along the way that have been big successes. For one we closed off part of Taikang Road and had about 800 people come. There were free food, drinks, entertainment - we had fire eaters, stilt walkers, all that sort of stuff. We did another party called the Red Party in a massive art warehouse on Moganshan Lu. About 25 different venues participated - we had everything from food and cocktails to massage and nails and yoga. Quiksilver had a half-pipe in there, we had skating demonstrations, fencing, all kinds of stuff.

What is the foreign/local split among your membership?

It's about 50/50 now. That's not a bad mix for us. On the one hand, the local market is growing quite strong - particularly that kind of upper-echelon, upwardly mobile well-to-do-type local market - they have international tastes, they're traveling around, they're very suited to Enjoy. That demographic's getting stronger and stronger. At the same time, the laowai market - the foreign market - is growing quite rapidly as well, I believe. In the three and a half years I've been here I feel like it's doubled - I don't know if that's actually the case, but it feels like we've got twice as many foreigners in this market now.

Who do you tend to hire?

It's funny. My original sales team was almost all foreigners, and now it's almost all locals. The locals that I've hired have done a pretty good job. I'm still a bit hands-on, I like to get involved with the sales. Because we have very stringent criteria for the level of our places that we put in the programme, it's very important for us to maintain what we class as the best of Shanghai and the best of China, and as such, I will usually go personally to every place before we sign a contract. I do the taste test.

Have you had any direct competition in the market?

If you ask most of our members if there's any competition I think they'd probably say no. I'm not aware of anything competing at our level. There are a lot of things in the market which overlap what we do, like Ctrip's gold card, and to some degree that represents competition, but nobody else really focuses on high-end venues the way we do. There was a voucher book called I Love Shanghai, but it sort of wound down about as we were getting started up. I think they came a bit early, and had a 'come one come all approach'. It wasn't focused as much on the best places around. There are a couple of ways to take the market here. You can come in guns a-blazing with huge amounts of capital and go to the 'dazhong' (mass) market, really focus on the masses and spend a lot of money on brand-building and marketing and just be huge about everything. Or, you can aim yourself at a niche and tackle a niche, really, and that's what we've done. We're not about the large populace that goes to Xinya Dabao and spends 10 kuai on wontons. We're about the market that spends hundreds on meals and can go out and buy branded goods. That's a good niche to tackle. I think the key to our success was to focus on what we're good at, and grow the business from there.

Are you still in love with the Shanghai scene?

I think the honeymoon is over, kind of. From a business point of view I'm more in love with it, but from a social and lifestyle point of view the novelty has worn off a bit. But I still do enjoy it here.

What main trend do you see in the development of night life and upscale dining in China?

I think everyone's looking at Shanghai. You can see it from the industry here - I think the main successful players that have gone into other cities are the successful players here in Shanghai. Places like Babyface - I think they got started in Guangzhou, but I don't think they hit success until they opened in Shanghai. That kind of model is quite popular, even from a restaurant perspective - you see some of the restaurants like Crystal Jade that are coming to China first through Shanghai, and then they replicate the idea elsewhere.

What's the plan now?

It has to be Beijing, definitely. Beijing by far is the next most probable move, and most lucrative move in this area. There's a lot of stuff happening up there food and beverage-wise, real estate-wise, it's moving very fast, and heading towards the Olympics as well. It's really picked up, and it'll only accelerate from there. When we started, Beijing wasn't really there. In my opinion, for a programme like this Shanghai is a few years ahead in terms of the sort of places that are out there in this industry, but I definitely think that Beijing has reached the point now where I think it would work. We've got Shanghai close to where we want it. We're just fine-tuning it a little bit more, and then we'll launch Beijing, and if that's successful we'll launch in other first-line cities. We want about 25-30,000 new members this year.