Vodka advertising has even non-drinkers inebriated

Those who first set foot in Romania at the end of last year must have thought they had arrived in the land of vodka. The commercials for Stalinskaya, Kreskova, Dakk, Discovery and Voronskaya were flowing on TV. This sensation will be even more poignant after the National Audio-visual Council banishes alcohol ads from the 06.00-22.00 time interval.
Global Spirits last year launched no less than four brands, of which two were vodka brands: Dakk and Goldessa. Prodal ’94 came up with the Discovery vodka and the distilled alcoholic drink called Passion, while Alexandrion joked with the Kreskova vodka. After such a feast, the consumers of vodka are probably already dizzy, even before tasting the new offers.
Only not everybody is happy: sellers feel the market is getting too crowded. “We earned less than expected last year, because there were more licensed drinks,” said Gheorghe Iaciu, general manager of Global Spirits Company, the producer of Dakk vodka.
According to Iaciu, the company ended 2001 with “real” profit (40 billion ROL or some $1.3 million), but last year’s minus amounted to 15 billion ROL (431,000 dollars). Still, after having launched four kinds of spirits, Global Spirits says it won’t stop here.
“We will launch another brand in February. Brands are our ways to express ourselves,” Iaciu said. The Global Spirits manager says that 500,000 dollars are generally invested in the launch of a brand, but another half a million dollars are needed every year to “support” the respective brand.
On the other hand, Nauaf Salameh, manager of the Alexandrion group, believes that launching several new products at the same time is not the right strategy.
“I believe that launching new products, just like the others are doing, is a mistake, since these companies had standard products and abandoned them in favour of the new ones, so they ended up losing even the other products,” Salameh said.
His company launched Kreskova vodka in October, but Salameh says there will be no other launchings soon.
“We are not rushing into anything. In fact, I don’t know what has gotten into other companies, which keep launching new products. The market is now oversaturated,” Salameh added.
However, specialists say that this sudden brand agglomeration is not such a strange phenomenon, after all. Valentin Radu, project manager with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, told Ziarul Financiar that this situation was triggered precisely by the lack of big names, of brands, manifest for the past few years.
“The spirits market was dominated by all kinds of anonymous brands. There were no brands. In fact, there were no other brands other than the imported ones,” Radu stated.