Russian Marketing
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Marketing and advertising in Russia by Konstantin Dlutskiy
Wednesday, September 27, 2006Eat liver!
One of the most difficult challenges for marketing in meat processing is how to sell so called sub-products: liver, heart, kidneys, etc. There are a lot of people who like liver. I personally find liver stroganoff delicious but there are not enough of us to get rid of all livers left after poor animals are dismembered into a thousand little parts. Of course one can make pate out of liver or liver sausages but above all we need to draw consumer attention to the product and attract new liver lovers. It seems like this problem is very old. Here’s a French ad from the 20’s calling French housewives to eat liver. No wonder marquis de Sade was French.
Konstantin
Kotleta in a bunFew people know outside Russia know about Anastas Mikoyan and I think some 90% of Russians think that Mikoyan is a sausage brand. This is true – Mikoyan is the most popular brand of meat products in Russia named after Anastas Mikoyan – the People's Commissar for external and internal trade from 1926 till 1939. He is known for “importing” dozens of American food technologies from the US to the Soviet Union. The idea was to build giant food producing plants and America was then the only country in the world to offer frankfurter producing factories with an output of 100 tons a day. American businessmen loved Mikoyan. On a single trip after one short “excursion” into a factory that produced 80 tons of frozen convenience food a day he could say, “We want five of them. Now!” Thanks to Mikoyan Russians learnt the taste of industrially produced food: ice cream, sausage, frankfurters, canned milk and mayonnaise, etc. Not that there was no ice cream or sausage in the Soviet Union before but it was home made - not by giant khladokombitants or myasokombinats.
Some products imported from America by Mikoyan were success but some failed. For example, Mikoyan wanted hamburgers to become popular Russian fast food. But ‘kotletka in a bun’ even after special promotion and advertising campaigns couldn’t win the hearts and stomachs of Russians. Actually the Soviet advertising was almost always about forcing people to eat something they don’t like.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006Moscow International Festival of Advertising is over. All in all it was pretty boring and uneventful but I try to post some ads and commercials I found curious. Take this one.
Silver prize at Label and Packaging. HEROIN
Not everyone knows that Heroin was invented by a German pharmaceutical company Bayer. It was viewed a safe alternative to morphine. During the testing many researches found that together with pain killing the drug made them feel elated, euphoric and heroic. So the new drug was called Heroin. It was banned in Germany only in 1969. |
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