The RMAA Group`s President Vadim Tylik talks about global marketing trends on the 25th Anniversary of the Comvort group in Barcelona

Barcelona hosts the international network’s Annual General Meeting where members and heads of large European business corporations meet up to benchmark. The President of RMAA Group Vadim Tylik took part and acted as a speaker on the event.

Comvort, the world’s largest international networks of independent MarCom agencies is back to square one to reminisce the spirit of the group since they were first founded in Frankfurt in 1989. This year’s AGM was by all means the most special one, as they celebrated the network’s 25th Anniversary. Therefore, Barcelona - the corner of the Mediterranean - was the city chosen to host the event with the participation of its international members.

The speech`s topic of the RMAA Group`s President Vadim Tylik was ‘Reduction in the effectiveness of any advertising message modern trend! What does the perfect marketing strategy of the present and future look like?’

You can see the text of Vadim`s speech on the 25th Anniversary of the Comvort Group below:

Good morning ladies and gentlemen!

I am glad to welcome you to the 25th Anniversary of the Comvort  Group. I have the honor of participating in today's event and act here as a speaker. So, let me introduce myself, my name is Vadim Tylik, I'm an entrepreneur, president of RMAA GROUP - Russian Marketing and Advertising Agency.

During the last three years I have been working closely with international business helping them entering the Russian market. As a result of this activity, I have aquired some understanding and experience that I would like to share today. I hope that you will find it useful. The first part of my presentation will focus on the global marketing as well as business trends and problems. In the second part I will talk about my personal experience and the experiences of my partners as to how to overcome the problems and work with new trends.

Pretty often I happen to attend various marketing conferences and events where all participants with a great inspiration talk about the ways how to succeed in marketing and promotion business. However today I would like to begin my speech with not altogether positive information and to brief the participants of this conference on the business and marketing reality that surrounds us in 2014. Moreover, the reality I will speak today is going to become more exacerbated and entrenched from year to year. I think that success in marketing of the future will belong only to those who are fully aware of the current trends and make appropriate changes in his marketing strategy today to get success tomorrow.

So, how does a modern marketing and business reality look like?

Trend №1. Every day, the amount of information in the world doubles.

We live in a world overloaded with information. A huge amount of data hits each inhabitant of our planet every day. According to the American Marketing Association, in 1960 you need to broadcast your advertising message 4 times per day to be memorized by customer. How many adverts per person a day you need to broadcast in the United States today? The figure has increased fiflyfold! About 200 advertising messages per person per day in the US.

In Russia, this figure is about 150 contacts per day. In Europe, according to my personal and intuitive estimates, this figure is close to the Russian one. So-called overloaded channel syndrome occurs when the information is transmitted faster than it can be sensed.

As a result, people retreat, close and seek refuge from the information invasion. They literally turn off! Just think: your e-mail bursts with an endless stream of letters, you have the opportunity to go to a billion of websites, you can watch as many videos as you want, your mailbox is overflowing with the printing garbage. And also we do not take into account the voicemail, SMS, blogs or updates in social networks.

Trend №2. Reduction the effectiveness of advertising messages, no matter how creative and professional they may be.

This is a consequence of the first trend. I am sometimes surprised by marketers who show an ideal advertising layout of the 1980s. Yes, some elements from it can be considered, but it is important to understand that the effectiveness of each advertising channel decreases from year to year. Due to the high level of information noise a modern metropolis inhabitant "got" immune to any advertising message. As I said before, a modern megacity inhabitant receives hundreds of them a day by means of a great number of channels: TV, radio, outdoor advertising, internet, telephone.

In modern conditions the word "no" - does not mean that your product is bad, "no" is the standard response, it is acquired immunity to advertising messages. All this is a huge problem for any business: if the customers do not receive your information, they likely do not even think about you. What should the business do? What is his choice?

Try to use all the channels at once, or ignore the changes occurred in the world and act in traditional manner. In the first case it will cost you a fortune. You will not be able to keep up for all simply because information channels are so numerous, and each year the new ones may appear. In the second case, your business is doomed to failure in the medium term.

I completely understand that today`s audience is the gathering of advertising business representatives, and we all know that as long as our marketing services are effective our advertising business will grow also. Whereas the benefit from our marketing services reduces, we as advertising agencies stop to produce the results and our business starts to fall.

So today we all need to answer honestly the following questions: Do your advertisers have budgets enabling them to stay every day in sight of their client? Is your customers` turnover so significant that they can trust you with millions of dollars on an advertising campaign without any guarantees?

What does the perfect marketing of the future and the present look like?

Let`s begin with the fact that today people started distrusting the advertisement! I mentioned some of the reasons why it happens, in the first part of my presentation. According to the testimony of "Trust Barometer" of Edelman Digital about 30% of the respondents tend to believe advertising messages. The numbers are depressing.

In this regard, I have a question for the audience, what is a key issue in marketing and sales today?

Trust! As potential customers initially feel suspicious about your business, the successful development of the company becomes a serious challenge. "The main strategic objective for many companies is our ability to regain the trust of customers and build relationships with them more effectively" – specified in the Harvard Business Review article.

The ideal marketing of the future and the present is the marketing which creates the trust! So the key objective that lay before the companies and brands is to work on creating the TRUST, only in this case can a company expect to succeed. Needless to say the bigger advertising pressure does not enable us to gain the trust.

My experience and experience of my colleagues shows that the most effective solution for consumer trust management is: CREATING THE LOYAL CONSUMER GROUPS, ON THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERESTS AND NONMATERIAL IDEAS

Let me avoid commenting on what I mean by this definition, so let's take a real business case of my partners which I like.

I`d like to know who of those here present are from Italy? Excellent! Now we will talk about you and Russia`s love affair with Italy).

Okay, the problem: a number of Italian brands (food manufacturing area, alcoholic beverages) are seeking the ways to enter the Russian market but not only gain the trust of b2c audience, but also to enter the b2b market, namely to get restaurants and elite catering establishments as partners. To perform this task, a project of Italian Week in Russia has been created.

Briefly Italian Week is a social project that joins thousands of Russians who are interested in Italy, as a country. The project tells about the Italian gastronomy, design, Italian language, Italian lifestyle, culture and travel! The first Italian Week festival was held in Moscow (for the first time) in October 2012, in 14 days the event was attended by more than 5,000 people. All of this audience is people who are interested and are not indifferent to Italy. Within the Italian Week festival they could get acquainted with the Italian culture, history, film industry, language, and, of course, with traditional food and drinks.

The first event was free of charge, and it was widely publicized in the Russian media. As I said before the event was attended by more than 5,000 Moscovites, so the result of the first Italian Week festival in Moscow was the formation of a large base of "fans" of the Italian culture. Italian Week project earned a great reputation by giving people the opportunity to plunge into the atmosphere of Italy free of charge.

So let's turn to our root objective: promotion of specific Italian brands in the Russian market. Now when we have a loyal audience, who but our fans will be the first lawyers of brands in Russia? Over the last two years there were four festivals and the fifth one will take place in November. In these following festivals the specific Italian brands were already represented, and there were presentations of some Italian companies.

What was the relation of the festival visitors towards the brand presentations? Only positive. People came with enthusiasm to absorb useful information about Italy, meanwhile they learned about the "unique" favorite Italian food. Italian Week is a hangout, which joined people on the ground of common interests and love for Italy. Today the non-profit project of Italian Week has become a very active structure around which "fans of Italy", Italian businessmen and Russian journalists have united.

As a result, today with the help of this project they bring on the Moscow market lots of Italian products: Italian cafes in Moscow, cheese brands, wines, language schools, travel agencies. And the presentation of Italian wines caused conclusion of some contracts for supply of wines to the Moscow restaurants.

Now let's imagine what would it be if we initially tried to promote the production by direct advertising pressure? Would it be successful? We would have certain results, but would not gain so much confidence and interest of the public. What if the audience of "fans" of Italy in Russia were invited to a presentation of Italian products? Most people would simply refuse to participate in it. The first thought: "they want to "flog" me something? I'm not interested in it! ".

That`s why, in order to create a successful product and bring it to market, it is important to think in advance about creating a group of "loyal customers", it is important not to sell at once, but to be able to wait for the moment when the level of trust is high enough to make an offer to purchase. Therefore, the ideal marketing today must create ready customers who will have no objections to your product because they trust you completely.

I want to repeat that I am in no way talking about renouncing the standard methods of media promotion. In my opinion, in modern conditions it is important to be able to combine the strategy of active marketing and the strategy of creating non-profit groups on the ground of ideas.

At the present this model is implemented only for Italian entrepreneurs in Russia, so for other European countries this opportunity is open today. For example, at the moment I'm in talks with a group of entrepreneurs from Iceland, who are interested in getting into the elite restaurants of Moscow and St. Petersburg with their fish. Russia has not imposed IMBARGO for the fish products from Iceland.

As part of the output of Icelandic products to the Russian market, there are plans to organize a "Dinner Party", where the chefs and restaurateurs will be invited; actually they are the persons who decide on the purchase of products. In addition, within the frame of the global promotion of products from Iceland there are plans to organize the "Week of Iceland" festival. What I have told you today can be called the ready and proved model that can be applied "almost" in all European countries.

The second case, which I would like to consider, is about my experience of the promotion of a German online browser-based game DRAKENSANG in the Russian market that our agency dealt with.

The advertising campaign was quite ambitious, so I will not go into the details of advertising on TV and in specialized magazines for gamers, I`ll move on to the most interesting and creative project of the advertising campaign.

Our challenge was to build a game in already existing social communities in order to make it recognizable among the Russian users. We understood that there’s no sense in creating a social group for this, it will take a lot of time and efforts, so the best solution in this case was to fit into the existing communities and ask community leaders to recommend our product for audience. Why waste effort when such platforms have already been created.

We started looking in the direction of video blogs. In Russia such thing as video blogging is very common. Youtube has a very high popularity in Russia not only as a video hosting service, but also as a social network.

Since the core of the target audience of DRAKENSANG online following are teenagers and young people aged 12-30 years (teen audience prevails), we began to search for a reputable community for students.

To create videos we have attracted popular Runet video bloggers: anchors of the popular show “I Like” and video blogger Sam Nickel (the man who touched thousands of breasts in the video with Vladimir Putin).

By the way, this video with Sam Nickel is one of the most successful in the history of viral marketing in Russia. The video scored a total of about 40 million views. I recently had talks with Chinese partners in Moscow, where I mentioned about this video, and to my surprise the Chinese partners were familiar with it.

Let`s return to our idea of promotion of a German game in the Russian market. Thus, we found social communities, and now the task was to make a beautiful pitch, rather than just advertise the game. That`s why, the idea was to organize a battle between popular video bloggers to determine the best Drakensang player. In parallel we made a voting for users. To make the viral effect our bloggers had to play in unusual places.

So the first video was filmed at night in the forest, two other bloggers played Drakensang in the sauna and jacuzzi, and a third blogger hired a prostitute, so that she helped to pump his game staff to a certain level.

Total five videos scored 1.5 million views for the period of 1.5 months. That is quite a good result for Russia. In my opinion a similar campaign in the United States would score about 4 million views as Youtube is more popular and active there.

As a conclusion of examples given above which concerned both Italian Week and promotion of the browser-based game Drakensang, I would like to highlight the following: many marketers and entrepreneurs care only about their customer base and focus only on it, but as the examples show, it is important today not only to take care of their customers, but also to pay attention to a wider audience.

Even if this audience buys nothing from you today, it will be the great foundation for your business success in the future. People of your audience may be beneficial not only as customers but also as advocates of the brand, consultants and partners. In other words, the broader your like minded audience is the wider your customer base will become.

As the third case study I would like to consider the strategy for development of our agency - RMAA Group.

Of course we have a marketing policy, both as the agency and the brand. And as the changes in business reality impact on our business either, so I decided that not only our customers, but we have to move with the latest trends, I have talked about today. Therefore, in the development of our agency we work to create a community of marketers from all over the world being outside Russia, but who are interested in the Russian market.

At the moment our database includes about 5,000 marketers and entrepreneurs in countries all over the world who are constantly in contact with us. The current foundation for uniting the audience is our mailshot, which is called "Blog about the successful marketing strategies in Russia." We create and supply our audience with the most useful information about the basics of marketing in Russia, market design and characteristics of the market, that is, give a basic knowledge about the Russian market. As an example of content marketing is two free e-books, for which our audience expressed us a great gratitude. The names of the books are: «HOW DOES THE MEDIA-BUYING MARKET IN RUSSIA WORK? A media buyers' quick guide for effective work in Russia» and «HOW CAN A FOREIGN COMPANY ENTER THE RUSSIAN B2B MARKET? Effective B2B marketing strategies in Russia».

My appreciation goes also to the Comvort group for supporting my initiative in promoting my e-books. The content marketing allows us to keep the interest of the audience of marketers and entrepreneurs all over the world. We do not sell by means of distribution; we support people providing them with qualitative information, in the end it brings us the expertise and the respect of our audience. Nobody says that 5000 audience is drawn to our services, but I can clearly see that the wider audience we get, the more interesting projects face us. Well+, as a conclusion of my today's speech, I would like to say the following: Today, in the age of information, everything is changing very quickly. So our mind must learn to be as flexible as possible in order to fit into a new reality. And the reality of the future - it's even larger information noise than today. That`s why, the brands need to establish close links with the audience to be able to convey his “proposal”. Moreover, the audience itself must intend to interact with you, you could not attach it artificially. It is either interested in interacting with you or not. The examples that I have given today is not something extraordinary, it is quite widespread business practice. Huggies creates the clubs for young mothers; Gillet creates online resource where men get "male information", which they appreciate. In addition, it is important to note that the group, united on the basis of common interests, can not only be online, but also offline as we found out today by the example of Italian Week project. Thank you all for your attention, I hope that you found my report interesting and it will be useful to you and your customers in business.

I wish to thank the Comvort group once again for the invitation to this event and wish success to all participants of today's event.

About RMAA Group

RMAA Group is independent Russian full service advertising agency. RMAA Group supports b2c and b2b international brands entering the Russian market and helps them in finding Russian customers. Key clients of RMAA Group are situated in the USA, the Great Britain, China and South Korea. The agency`s core competencies include: advertising, branding, marketing strategy & media planning and buying, email marketing & eCRM, events, mobile and social media, direct marketing and design.

Learn more about RMAA Group in the agency`s blog about successful marketing strategies in Russia.