In a new series of posts Polish born Kamil Michlewski, Senior Consultant at The Value Engineers, looks at the big questions facing Polish brands trying to make it in the UK.

Can Polish brands seriously compete with more established brands in the UK market?

For the Polish brands to compete with the mainstream they would have to bring something distinctive and authentic to the market. There are plenty of substitute brands which would be impossible for the Polish equivalents to upstage, no matter how much was spent on research and promotion. Delicje and Tiger are just two examples of such brands. Jaffa Cakes and Red Bull – their UK equivalents – have dominant market positions and are deeply entrenched in the minds of the customers.

Kubuś, Almette and Tymbark, on the other hand, are products with distinct offers which have enough going for them (e.g. different taste/texture profile) that they could potentially cross-over into the mainstream. It would not happen by simply increasing their availability, though. Their branding and the way they connect with the British consumer would have to be looked at and modified to meet the subtlties and nuances of the UK market.

Another potentialty successful strategy to embed a Polish brand would be to follow a sizable chunk of the Polish population in the UK and determine their professional needs. For example, it is very likely that a big number of Polish tradesmen would prefer to use the Atlas range of building materials, if readily available in the UK. Rather than wasting time having to relearn what the British equivalent of certain Polish materials was, they would already know. In such circumstances their brand loyalty would be even higher in the UK than it was back in Poland! What could follow would be an increased penetration amongst the indigenous population as a result of product trial and word-of-mouth recommendations. I think this is a significant opportunity to spearhead the brand sales in the UK.

Note: Some of the questions in the series have been supplied by Monika Bodera, Managing Director of Polarity UK Limited – a Polish panel provider and a consultancy. They were part of a report put forward by Polarity UK which was covered in a Cooltura/elondon article.

In a new series of posts, Polish born Kamil Michlewski, Senior Consultant at The Value Engineers, looks at the big questions facing Polish brands trying to make it in the UK.

There are now hundreds of Polish brands, especially FMCG products, in the UK. Will they actually be bought by British consumers?

In order for the UK consumers to pick up Polish products, Polish brand owners and marketers will need to look at how their brands can be adjusted to suit local expectations and tastes. In our experience at The Value Engineers, the product is the strongest part of the marketing mix of Polish brands. Other elements - packaging, promotion, distribution – tend to be lacking.

The difficult to pronounce brand names themselves do not help in the recall and recognition amongst Brits. Hence, Polish brands currently do not feature on the British shopper’s consideration set. To give just one example; Żubrówka gets phenomenal word of mouth from the Poles in the UK but the recognition of the name amongst indigenous population is extremely poor. The local brand shortcut is ‘bison grass’ vodka.

A case could certainly be made for developing this distinctive feature into a true differentiator amongst the largely generic vodka category in the UK. To achieve that, it would be important to look at UK brand hierarchy and how it connects with the needs, preferences and expectations of the British population. As one can imagine, the potential rewards for getting it right are huge.

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…