Slideshare presentation: 10 lessons youth brands can learn from street art

At Thinktank we have had numerous projects on young people and youth culture around the world. As you can imagine, street art has been an integral part of young people's lives.


So we thought we could share our thinking and put together a powerpoint deck on lessons that youth brands can learn from the street art world.

10 lessons youth brands can learn from street art from Thinktank International, London

10 things marketers need to know about Russia: fair trade, cash, mobile and market research

This is the last blog post in our '10 things about Russia' series. To read the previous 6 insights, please click here.

#7 Fair trade? Never even heard of it!
Russia is also unusual in having had an imperial, but no obvious colonial past. So the whole concept of Fair Trade and concerns or ‘liberal guilt’ about conditions in the developing world are often quite muted. This means that ethical or environmental claims tend to be missed or even misunderstood by many consumers.

#8 Russians buy in different ways.
It would be easy to assume that living in a G8 country with a fairly high GDP per capita income would mean that people had bank accounts and be used to online payments, but... as always Russia has its own way. The financially unstable 1990s and a number of bank collapses long undermined people's trust in financial institutions. Even in 2012 Russia remains a cash or digital cash economy on a day-to-day basis.

People can pay cash for anything - including property and luxury cars. Online transactions are still more of an exception rather than a rule. Online shops will deliver products by courier, who collect the cash from customers.

#9 Money on the other hand is more mobile.
The underdeveloped banking system also means that mobile payments (by texting and using stored value cards) are more common and more sophisticated than they are in many Western markets.

Strong WiMax networks and free WiFi in most places also mean that the mobile Internet and mobile marketing are more advanced.

#10 Not the easiest consumer to study.
Russians - culturally - were never asked for their opinion. Russia is still not a market where consumers will easily ‘play the game’ and speak effortlessly about their feelings about products or brands, setting aside the rational answers that can sometimes frustrate research buyers.

For this reason, marketers need to be mindful of how they approach research, whom they target and what the best format for exploring a brand or campaign idea is. That’s where we come in.

We hope you enjoyed our 10 things that marketers should know about Russia. Hopefully it is no longer a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

WiFi and a pint of Guinness, please

I was absolutely intrigued this weekend to see that our local pub has started to offer ‘Wireless’ to customers …and even more so to learn from the landlord, that there had been much more of an uptake than he’d anticipated. He even reported to have had one or two people coming in during the afternoons specifically to work away on their laptops My immediate thought was to see this as real clash of cultures. Surely all of the rituals and behaviours caught up in the British pub are the antithesis of what the wireless worker is signifying when they open up their PowerBook and start to type away During some on-trade ethnographic research for a drinks brand last year it was very clear that being in the pub is about personal freedom, but also about community and spending time with others. Whereas, the wireless hotspot user at present looks to be much more isolated and in need of being alone… But perhaps with the launch of WiFi mobiles and the smoking ban just around the corner, there won’t be such a clash after all. Accessing a wireless hotspot through your mobile phone puts up far fewer barriers to ‘the community’ than using your laptop ever could. And a smoke free environment, well that just makes it a nicer place to stop and pick up emails or do some work.