Having recently been to Poland on business with one of our financial services clients, I observed that there appears to be a greater variety of brands on the high streets and in the shopping malls there than in UK. Upon my return to Britain I decided to quickly check if there was any grain of truth in it…

I have used the number of brands in major shopping malls in Poland and UK as proxy for the variety of brands on the high street. It looks as though the largest shopping mall in Kraków has almost 60% more brands than the largest shopping mall in London. This might be somewhat skewed by the fact that the calibre and stature of brands at Westfield in London is substantially higher, subsequently requiring more space and visibility.

In order to correct for the ‘premiumness’ of Westfield I looked at one of the largest, and very democratic, shopping centres in Europe – MetroCentre in Newcastle / Gateshead. It turned out that it had approximately only ten more brands than the Kraków mall on a total square footage nearly twice as big.

This is by no means conclusive evidence that there is a greater variety of brands on the Polish high street, but it seems to begin telling a consistent story. Therefore, I decided to risk a series of hypotheses which might start to explain this phenomenon. Here they are in no particular order of plausibility:

Hypothesis 1: brands disappear as industry players consolidate in a mature market economy.

Hypothesis 2: consumers in Poland expect and demand greater variety after the austerity of the socialist years, where there were only few, state-sponsored brands available.

Hypothesis 3: UK is a country with greater social capital than Poland (as understood by Fukuyama), therefore, people ‘congregate’ more around socially vetted (trusted) brands.

Hypothesis 4: UK citizens and Polish citizens are different when it comes to their preferred risk levels (which could be explained through Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance Index). This might lead the former to being more cautious on when it comes to brand choices and inversely may drive the latter towards being more adventurous with what brands they buy.

Hypothesis 5: the spread of modern marketing thinking, techniques and process has led to less haphazard product and brand launches in the UK when compared with Poland.

Do follow me on my quest to find out:

• a) whether the original observation holds true,
• b) if it does, which of the hypotheses gets hammered down in the relentless process of elimination and which withstands the scrutiny…

1. “Desire is the very essence of man.” (Baruch Spinoza)

2. “Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.” (Kahlil Gibran)

3. “The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” (Robert Kiyosaki)

4. “A goal is not the same as a desire, and this is an important distinction to make. You can have a desire you don’t intend to act on. But you can’t have a goal you don’t intend to act on.” (Tom Morris)

5. “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” (Anon)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

In my earlier post, I suggested that BMW seemed not to be sticking to a coherent brand positioning. Admittedly, this rather stark hypothesis was based on several pieces of TV advertising, not on the wealth of marketing data we would normally be reviewing. Nevertheless, I felt that there was something not entirely in order with how BMW was joining all the marketing dots.

I wasn’t hugely surprised, then, when Campaign recently posted news about BMW calling a pitch for its advertising, digital and direct marketing accounts. The article stated that “the review is part of a statutory process that requires its accounts to be pitched every five years”. It so happens that the review will also include their UK advertising account led by US agency, GSD&M Idea City, appointed earlier in the year and responsible for their latest TV campaigns.

It looks as though BMW also think that brands like theirs deserve a robust, coherent and joined-up marketing plan…

Due to poor weather, missed sporting events and the recession the beer and cider categories have not been performing as well as expected. As a consequence, in this year’s Christmas season, supermarket offers on beer and cider have significantly increased.

Alex Waters, our Director of Capabilities, comments in this week’s The Grocer: “The winter season is historically a very tough one for beer and cider, and after a washout summer suppliers need to recover sales”.

It’s not all hard thinking here at The Value Engineers. Last week we had our annual Christmas party - with the theme of Pantomime.

Here’s a section of the cast, gathered for a sing-along.

Explaining pantomime to our international colleagues certainly generated some insights about British popular culture…