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In Russia a bar that prominently displays the sign "closed" and has a man outside shooing away would-be customers is a bar that, to the native mind, is open. In Russia, expensive canned Chinese beer, selling sluggishly in a provincial city, sold out immediately on rumors that it was a concentrate to which you added two liters of water. Such a country clearly has its own marketing techniques (as well as disgruntled and sober beer drinkers).
Russians have invented a video game on the perestroika theme in which the hapless entrepreneur leaps from island to island in a sea of bureaucracy (each island represents a new law--they grow and diminish, appear and disappear, with alarming rapidity) until the gloating bureaucrats sing "Cha Cha Cha" as the entrepreneur drowns. Such a country clearly mystifies its own people as much as others, but it also has a razor-sharp perception of its own situation.
The successful approaches to consumer marketing that companies and their advertising agencies take to Western Europe will be next to useless in Russia. There is no market and there is no consumer. Indeed, the only tenet of Western European markets transportable with profit to Russia is the advice to focus on the local consumer. But what then? Russian consumers--or potential Russian consumers--are not at all like those in the West. Some are suspicious of or actively hostile toward Western products. Others covet them, but have little money. One group has money and wants them under certain conditions. But, on the other hand, another large group is too undermined by uncertainty to do anything.
A marketing approach must recognize and build into its own process the fact that markets and consumers do not as yet exist in any real sense in Russia. Looked at one way, this is an immobilizing problem. Looked at another, it is an opportunity to create both markets, brands within them, and consumers for the brands.
The Western marketer eyeing the Russian market needs to penetrate to the psychology of the Russian people. If we understand how Russians think, feel, and act, we will have a model of Russian consumers that transcends the vagaries of current politics and economics. The Russian psyche existed long before the October Revolution and will...