Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994 TAG: 9401220141
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAREY GOLDBERG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
He was talking about the Snickers bar.
In the new Russia that President Clinton visited last week, some Western companies that slavered over potential Soviet sales as the Iron Curtain came down are beginning to make major inroads across the Russian expanse - and into the Russian consciousness.
Snickers and its Mars Inc. cousins - Bounty, Mars bars, Twix and Milky Way - appear to have penetrated the Russian market far beyond any other U.S. consumer product. Hawked by the most extensive advertising campaign here since the demise of communist propaganda, they are turning up across the heartland, from the Altai region in the southeast to Bryansk in the west.
Freezer wagons selling ice-cream versions of the Mars treats stand on corner after corner along St. Petersburg's central Nevsky Prospekt. Moscow schools in wealthier districts are strewn with the wrappers on days the cafeteria stocks the candies.
Demand is so high that chocolate thieves recently hijacked a Mars truck in central Moscow, grabbing tons of Mars and Snickers bars worth about $39,000. Teen-agers have been overheard computing prices in Snickers - "That would cost three Snickers!" - and Russians near the Chinese border reportedly consider the ability to buy two Snickers bars per week a sign that a person has solidly reached the middle class.
The candy bars have become so widespread that cultural critic Artemy Troitsky named them in his 1993 list of the top 10 Russian "objects of the year" for the daily Moscow Times, among other booming new trendy objects including handguns, currency exchange booths, casinos and telephones equipped so callers can be identified.
In the old Soviet Union, Russians could buy a taste of America mainly through Marlboro cigarettes, which were sold only for dollars and so highly valued that a pack could be used as virtual currency with cabbies and officials. Marlboro remains strong, as do Levi's jeans and Wrigley's gum.
But it is the humble Snickers bar, selling at 50 cents each or so, that has conquered the new Russians, who cast off communism in hopes of living like Americans. They may not be able yet to afford the big cars and houses, but the junk food, at least, is already within reach.
The Snickers success story is even more surprising here, considering that Russians already have plenty to tempt their notorious sweet tooth. They consume all kinds of more traditional cakes, ice cream and candies, including their own snack bars, which tend to feature darker, more bitter chocolate.
But Mars has found a distinctly American way to create a voracious appetite for its products through the kind of powerful, mercilessly repetitive advertising that has been pervasive in the United States for decades and is only now beginning here.
Starting in 1992 with billboards that irritated many consumers by advertising Mars products even before they were available in most stores, the campaign moved on last year to a television blitz the likes of which Russians had never seen. One Russian retail trade specialist said it seemed to him that not one hour went by without a Mars commercial.
With its near-universal name recognition, Snickers is also becoming a lightning rod for Russian sentiment focused against the West, against the difficulties of the new era. The hard-line Moskovskaya Pravda recently ran an editorial lambasting President Boris Yeltsin's reformers for claiming to care about the country while in fact, it said, they were more concerned about taking foreign trips and building themselves luxurious houses.
"They flooded the country with chocolate bars," it said as an example of bad ideas, "and now when you ask schoolchildren to name the planets, they quickly answer, `Mars, Snickers . . . ' "
Another newspaper ran a cartoon that depicted a poster proclaiming Snickers the best antidote to hunger - with an emaciated man clearly dead of starvation lying beneath it.
This anti-Western sentiment may contribute to Mars officials' refusal to talk about the company's Russian success and controversy. Masterfoods, the Mars arm in Russia, refused to comment even briefly on how it has managed to spread its distribution network across Russia's breadth where many others have failed.
A spokesman said it was too "commercially sensitive" and he would be disappointed if Masterfoods were even mentioned in this story. The Mars headquarters in McLean, Va., was equally closemouthed, in keeping with its reputation for extreme secrecy. Industry sources have long joked that the nearby Langley, Va.-based CIA houses only the second-most secretive bunch in Northern Virginia.
A Russian expert on retail trade said Mars might be especially reluctant to talk, in part because it was badly burned by a phony story in the Russian media about a poisoned Snickers bar that allegedly killed a little girl in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow. The story ran in a local newspaper and was picked up by national television, he said, in what he believed to be a sign that the battle for the Russian chocolate market was growing so nasty that a competitor tried to sabotage Snickers to cut its early lead.
Ultimately, he added, the Mars dealer network is strong - but the real key to the candy's success has been the nonstop advertising.
Whether Snickers will remain affordable depends in large part on whether the Russian government decides to heed the calls from domestic industry to impose tariffs on imported consumer goods.
by CNB