The meanings of Polish vodka

At the end of last week, international press agencies accounted on the vote cast by the Polish Parliament on Friday, which decided to call off the right of a French company to market abroad the famous vodka brands Wyborowa and Zubrowka, earmarking this right exclusively for domestic manufacturers. The exporter is a former foreign trade company from the communist age, subsequently privatised.

This story will naturally trigger fiery legal debates, perhaps even international trials in matters of industrial ownership and brand protection. That is why debating the issue from this point of view should be left to the experts. However, if we look into the matter taking into account the way Warsaw authorities understand to manage a national asset, there are many meanings that cannot be overlooked. What do Polish vodka brands have to do with Romania? Apparently, almost just as much as the banana war, the fight for oceanic fishing or the dispute over chocolate ingredients. Unfortunately, Romanians still smile when serious international bodies are debating this kind of matters for months, and certain states chill down ties with their rivals because of such fights. Let’s bear in mind that all these mean good money. And there are not petty battles when it comes to money. In fact, life and death commercial battles are fought right before our eyes. And winners manage to sell more products and thus earn more money, while losers are left without retail markets, produce in vain and eventually go bankrupt.

Going back to the issue of Polish vodka brands, the first meaning is that Romanians know too little about the value and importance of a brand. The brand is worth more than the product itself, the plant that manufactured it and the raw materials altogether. If a brand gets to be known, that means it has a stable retail market. You may manufacture as many products as you wish, of better quality; if the outcome of your work does not wear a brand name that is familiar to the client, he fails to buy it and this means that you wasted labour and raw materials. That is why huge sums are spent on advertising, so as the public may recall one brand or another. The second meaning is that when a brand is a national asset, this is enough for any state authority to be highly concerned on the way that good is exploited. Going back to Romania, I haven’t noticed Romanian authorities’ concern about national brands. When speaking about privatisation, one refers especially to the sale of certain plants and factories, more or less strategic, whose technologies unfortunately are much outdated. The issue of keeping the staff of these plants, most of the times outsized, is much and fiercely tackled. The topic of industrial lands is tackled just as much and even more fiercely, with strokes of red-with-anger nationalism. But when it comes to brands, absolute silence. The ways to use a brand, as well as the rights of a brand owner, are written down in the Law 84/1998 on brands and geographic directives. For instance, the owner of a brand may grant exclusive licence to a manufacturer, who is thus granted the right to sell a product wearing that particular brand name. Or he may offer non-exclusive licences to several manufacturers. “To offer” is just a way of putting it, as licences for famous brands bring good money to their owners. Romanian authorities seem to ignore all these facts with serenity. The sale of the Pitesti-based car plant was presented as a great victory. Did Renault buy the plant or Dacia brand, and along with it three quarters of the Romanian market? If we think in economic terms, the question is purely rhetorical. The problem is that we obstinately sought to sell the plant. With its equipment that has to be replaced anyway, with a staff six times larger than an efficient plant would need to produce the same number of cars. Additional costs for the French buyers, less money for us. Another example is the privatisation, disputed from the very beginning and ultimately contested in Court, of Societatea Nationala a Tutunului Romanesc (the National Company of Romanian Tobacco). Which, besides some ancient plants, owns two brands much-weighted on the Romanian market: Carpati and Snagov. As Romanian authorities did not have the heart to estrange the manufacturing brands, or at least some of them, even from the task book, we cannot even know how much money a little bid for some licences to manufacture Carpati or Snagov would have brought. We only can estimate that the money would have been much more. And examples – not too numerous, as unfortunately we do not have many valuable national brands – may go on.