The sixteen students from different countries were involved into our research about Russian brands):
11 from Russia
2 from France
1 from Hong Kong
1 from Spain
1 from Germany
The respondents named numerous Russian brands from various fields, for instance, oil and gas companies, confectionery factories, banks, telecommunication companies, automotive manufactures and the others.
We decided to conduct our research within the students audience because it was not just much easier to interview them, but even much more effective than interviewing the elder people. Students showed themselves as more active and aware consumers and their overall knowledge about branding and brands seems to be more relevant for our research.
The most frequently called Russian brand became a brand AvtoVAZ or better known as LADA(Russian automobile manufacturer). The most interesting thing is that this brand was named not only by Russian students, but also by girls from Spain and Germany. The Spanish one knows this Russian automobile brand well because of the advertising on TV in Spain. "The automotive sector is very developed in Spain and in their market has lots of cars of different brands, including Russian brand LADA", - Maria says. The German student Vera said that she knows only one Russian brand - LADA, but unfortunately, she doesn't know anything about this brand except that it exists and produces cars. In addition, the Russian student from Murmansk considers LADA brand as well-known not only in Russia, but also abroad (and put the example about the James Bond movie where you could see one of the current LADA models). She's also talking about the competitive advantages which the LADA's brand has - they are the relatively cheap price and the cheap maintainance. These are the reasons of popularity of this brand at the domestic market. Thus, LADA could be the Best Russain brand for the world according to our respondents. Also we should mention that another Russian student was talking about overall opportunities for car manufacturing in Russia - he believes that the problems this industry has do exist only because of non-rational usage of current resources. And he puts the example of the new Russian sport car to prove the possibility of successful cooperation between the independent entrepreneurs and the government. As the little summary, we can make the conclusion that people believe that Russian car industry has a lot of opportunities for further development and significant contribution for the world market. Despite of numerous problems with product quality, the most of our respondents believe that LADA brand is the best what we have in Russia nowadays.
But apart of this, we cannot mention the other brands named during our survey. There were interesting examples abour such brands as "Beeline" (trademark of the third largest Russian telecommunication operator, "VimpelCom") and "Europa Plus" (Russian's first and the most popular commercial radio station). These trademarks have really memorable images and creative advertising campaings which made them popular among the young people in Russia. These companies are the great examples of how the Russian consumers could be attracted and what they are interested in. If speaking about the manufactures of consumer goods we have some interesting and somehow unexpectable examples from both Russian and foreign students.
Vera is a student from Murmansk and she named the chocolate brand "Alenka". She said that this chocolate has an unrepeatable taste of childhood. Then Olga from Syktyvkar (Russia) named "Krasny Oktyabr", one of the oldest confectionary factories in Russia. And the "Alenka" chocolate is the product of "Krasny Oktyabr". Olga said that this brand associates for her not only with a qualitative products, but also with the truly national spirit of Russia. Therefore, "Krasny Oktyabr" is the second mostly often named brand in our research. According to our respondents, products under this brand have unique features (long history, the recipes proven by time and the image of truly Russian product) which could give the significant competitive advantages on the global market.
All in all, when talking about Russian students, we must say that very few of them were able to immediately name any of the brands. Finally, most of them stopped just on simple but really known examples of oil exporters (Gazprom), (Lukoil); banking companies (Sberbank) or weapon manufactures (Kalashnikov) - the brand names which are not actually relevant for casual customers. And during the entire communication with students we found out that young people are having difficult times with remembering any of Russian products with significant brand name which are not linked with raw materials production or processing of natural resources. None of brands from cloth manufacturing or electronic industry, for example !
Here we can directly go to the foreign students opinions. We have asked five of them from different countries, trying to gain information about their attitude to the Russian brands. And what we realized is that most of them have really no idea about Russian brands and the entire Russian economy as the whole . What they are mostly speaking about is the exporting of raw materials and natural resources from Russia but this is not really something that could be connected with branding of consumer goods once again. However, even knowing such information, none of the foreign students was able to name any of large oil or gas exporters from Russia. Sure, that could be due to the fact that products such gas and oil aren't being bought by consumers directly. But here we are faced with the fact that Russia mainly acts on the global market only as the exporter of different untreated resources (oil, gas, raw materials, sawn timber, paper, flax, coal, metal and others). So maybe this is a great reason to think about promotion of brands which connected with raw materials to make single consumer aware of them and probably try to establish relations with them. The General Electric company could be the great example.
Jason from Hong Kong also said that nobody wants to have a risk and import products from Russia, because these products aren’t so well-known and perhaps nobody will buy them.
However we have a rather unexpected sample from the French student Lucie who surprised us very much, naming a brand of watches "Raketa". Some of us didn't hear about that name before, but Lucie's opinion about this brand is very interesting. She said that the watches of this brand are very accurately reflect the history of Russia, its power and strength. Brand, which was invented in the Soviet Union, in our sight, has all chances to become a global brand today. Why not?
Another student from France (Mélodie) and the student from Hong Kong (Jason) don't know any of Russian brands. But they both noticed that when they think about Russian products "vodka" it's the first thing which comes to their mind. This is directly related to some kind of stereotypes about Russians which could lead us to the very interesting observation. Again we have the situation when the respondents call the product but could not recall any brands. And this is despite Russia exports its "national drink" to the European countries. For instance, such marks as "Stolichnaya", "Gorbachev", "Russkii Standart" and "Parlament" could be found in Europe. This is also the reason to think about market strategies for promotion of these brands on the global market.
Why not make a stake on the stereotypes if they somehow reflect the national character and could help to attract foreign customers?
