Ruski

Krasniy Vostok Brewery is sold to Efes Breweries International (Turkey). The price of the deal was only $360 mln. Nobody expected that Krasniy Vostok could be so cheap. It should’ve been at least $730-780 mln. But alas! Krasniy Vostok marketing failures in the last five years were so numerous and so disastrous that in 2005 it had only 3% share of Russian beer market (5,7% in 2002). Its productive capacity is 130 mln. dL but it sold only 19,9 mln. dL of beer last year.

Take for example its Ruski brand project. For those who don’t know Russian – (1) The word should be written with double ‘s’ russki, (2) The word is only used in an idiom “po-russki” meaning “in a way Russians do”. When I saw Ruski beer billboard for the first time I thought, “Hey! Spelling mistakes!” Later I learnt that the brand creators meant it – they thought this would boost the brand recognition. Next came satirical TV commercials picturing dull ways of drinking beer (Finnish or Japanese) and a jolly way to drink beer (po-russki). The jolly way – balalaikas, nesting dolls, dancing bears - are usually associated with vodka. No matter how kvass-patriotic Russians could be they know that the best beer is German or Czech but not Russian. And drinking beer po-russki is outright silly. Krasniy Vostok spent $2 mln on advertising and many times more on distribution with zero result. In 2003 it disappeared completely from store shelves.

Related Tags: Russia, beer, brand, Ruski, failure, Krasniy Vostok, Efes