Marketing

Headquarters of Hunnilieber, Inc., 8.30 A.M., marketing director's office. Meeting of regional and country managers. External politeness, but some bad mood appears sometimes in the director's voice. It's crisis time.

- Mister Fox.
- Yes, mister Bigbossy.
- Could you report on the market situation in Russia, and your possible measures to avoid a drop in sales because of the current economic crisis?
-Well, you know perfectly well that our product managers have been working very hard in order to introduce our main product, deodorants, into the Russian market. You know that one of the reasons that lay behind our poor performance so far is that the product, even if quite well-known among the female segment, was totally absent in the perception of Russian men.
- Really?
- Indeed, mister Bigbossy. Our first researches showed that some years ago, deodorants for men were totally unavailable in Russian stores, and that work had to start from zero.
- I can't believe it!
- Maybe you would if you had had the opportunity to use the metro at rush hour, as some of our researchers did.
- Oh...
- And the... experience gave evidence that introducing that kind of product would be no easy task at all.
- So?
- Our first target was the upper-class male Russian who could afford to buy a first-class deodorant. The problem with that kind of target market is that our product was not expensive enough to attract his attention, so we started to target another market, namely an ordinary middle-class Russian. We tried to understand his feelings and needs, but it has been far from simple, and I have to recognize that we did quite a lot of mistakes before we started doing things correctly.
- Quite a lot of mistakes, mister Fox? Could you elaborate on this?
- Well, in the beginning we tried to simply introduce our product without adapting anything. Our salespeople had been very successful in Russia with other different product lines, so we hoped that customers would rush to the stores to buy our deodorants, as it was the case with other products. But customers did not rush to the stores. On the contrary, our product stayed very long on the store's shelves and some store managers simply didn't want to work with it. Even the managers were not conscious about the possible advantage of using a deodorant.
- Amazing...
- Our salespeople had a tough time, not only trying to convince store managers, but just smelling the air in their premises. Not a bargain for a deodorant vendor, believe me.
- Go on.
- Our first little improvement came when we understood that the male population was oriented to success with the opposite sex. We saw the opportunity to find sinergies with other regional managers and started to sell the most modern labeling, just as we had done in other countries.



- Despite the success we had with this marketing improvement, we somehow felt that it was not enough and that we were in a position to achieve even better results. Our approach had been too general, whereas the Russian market required something more specific.
- But what about the crisis? You won't say that it hasn't hit you.
- It has, indeed, but in our opinion this is the time when you have to forget diplomacy and good manners for the sake of results. This is not the time to stand on ceremony, sirs. This is the time to show robust figures and look to your competitors with a sarcastic smile. We have concentrated all our efforts in the introduction of a new product line that is sure to wipe all our competitors off the market, because our product suits, not just the average Russian consumer, but the average Russian like nothing else. Here it is.