Oleg Yasenov has been working in the BELUGA Group for more than 16 years. During this time he and his team have launched many popular brands, such as Belenkaya, Arkhangelskaya, Myagkov vodka, FOX and DOGS whiskey, Zolotoy Reserve cognac, Green Baboon gin, Golubitskoe Estate wine and Tete de Cheval sparkling wine. He sh about the role of marketing in large companies and his career path
Oleg, is it true that marketing is totally tied to advertising?
No, marketing is by no means only about advertising, if only for the reason that brand promotion is not even a half of a marketer's overall tasks, but only a small percentage of his work. From the very beginning of my career path, I worked in manufacturing companies that were creating their own brands and were distributing them after all.
In large companies, a marketer's primary job is to figure out the realization of a unique idea, create a brand, come up with a naming and a promotional strategy. In addition, the marketer works with all units of the company: design, production, commercial promotion elements, financial health of the brand, and team selection. Therefore, it is a special drive to work in marketing for a large company that is involved in creating its own brands.
Over the course of your career you must have managed to develop your own principles and new non-standard solutions to achieve marketing goals, tell us more about it
Sure. The main highlight of being a marketer is flexibility in adapting, revising, and re-evaluating your own strategies and ideas that you have planned at a certain stage of your work. This allows for creativity
and creative thinking, which is very important for marketing.
You have to realize that the alcohol market in Russia is a dark market, which in turn creates certain difficulties related to the promotion of goods and brands. In such situations, integrations and collaborations come to the rescue, for example, working with bloggers and taking part in the filming of music videos. So we worked with Ilya Varlamov, Vladimir Mukhin, fametime tv on YouTube, made many integrations into music videos and product placements in movies.
Also, thanks to that very flexibility, we have launched a huge number of brands that are now top brands on the market. For example, more than 10 years ago we launched our Golden Reserve cognac, and not so long ago we launched Arkhangelskaya vodka, the crazy wine brand Golubitskoe Estate, Tete de Cheval sparkling wine, the popular Green Baboon gin, and Fox & Dogs whisky.
What are in your opinion the specifics of a marketer's work in a large company?
A marketer is a specialist immersed in the culture, the interests of his or her target audience, and the market condition. An integral quality of a marketer is emotional intelligence because he or her has to work with a large number of different people and ideas.
For such a specialist it is extremely important to adequately and constructively take criticism. When the marketer gets into a management position, however, it is imperative to understand the business aspects in terms of the feasibility of ideas. For example, in managerial positions you must have a "helicopter view": when you see not only the idea and the product, but the whole business and its portfolio. To summarize, we can say that the specifics of a marketer's work is the mandatory possession of empathy, emotional intelligence, and managerial vision.
