Customer conference Russia

Company News - Monday, October 15, 2012

Call to action conference in Russia

Last year Ecolean Russia held a customer conference in Moscow for the first time, with the focus being on Marketing and Sales. The event was highly appreciated and encouraged us to hold a second conference with yet more inspiring speakers and fun activities. It turned out to be so inspiring that some customers started making changes as soon as they got back to their desks.

The event took place over two days in late September in Volen – a small ski resort in the Moscow region. The weather was sunny, the air was cool and fresh and the leaves on the trees were changing to golden brown. It was a rest period in the outdoor sporting activities and the place was quiet and peaceful, except for the helicopters with their in-flight training. About 20 customers from Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan gathered in this forum to find out the latest news from Ecolean and to learn more about packaging communication and the dairy market and also to meet people from last year's conference.

Lars Wallentin, who has lectured all over the world and who has 40 years' experience as a designer and teacher in marketing at Nestlé, opened proceedings on the first day, communicating in his powerful way. He criticised packaging designs with no communication. Packages must communicate the reason for buying the product and should be a call to action to the consumer. A decent-looking design is not enough; it must tell you something – something that makes you buy it. Ariuna Dandarova, Head of Product Development at APU Company, Mongolia, had read Lars Wallentin's books and was looking forward to the event very much.

"This is something that happens only once in a lifetime"
Ariuna Dandarova

APU Company will start up a new Ecolean project next year, so Ariuna and her colleague, Mr. Bayarkhuu, became inspired by ideas on their future dairy products. But it was not only the customers with new products in the pipeline who got inspired. Customers with packaging designs that have looked the same for years obtained enlightenment from Lars' theories.

After Wallentin's speech, Vadim Zhuravlev from the Mildberry branding agency continued, giving a different perspective on packaging design and communication that inspired a great deal of enthusiasm in the audience and generated a lot of questions and answers.

There was an enormous response on this day. People brought their packaging designs to get feedback from the Packaging Communication experts and the discussion continued during the dinner and late into the evening. Everyone wanted comments on their package.

The following day, Anna Annerås and Louise Hobroh from Ecolean headquarters revealed the new phase that Ecolean is now entering. From being a small company with major investments in technology, the main focus is now on expansion. This means entering new emerging markets and also new product segments in juice beverages, etc. The audience were told about three big future launches by customers in China, Pakistan and Western Europe that we will hear more about later this fall. Ecolean has become a global business partner that can compete with any other packaging supplier in terms of safe and reliable packaging systems.

To conclude the event, we took a look at the global and local dairy markets. Our customers shared their success stories, which were very much appreciated. Brand Managers Natalia Zhuravleva and Svetlana Malysheva from the Molvest company spoke about the successful redesign of their most popular brands – Vkusnoteevo and Fruate. Elena Pokrovskaya, PR Manager at the Molochniy kit company described the meaning of their creative brand name "Three cows and 2 cats", whose products have been launched with notable success. Nikolay Panasenko, Commercial Director of Zalesskiy Fermer, impressed us with the company's rapid expansion in the Kaliningrad market, which was made possible by a close partnership with retailers.

This event has proved to be a winning concept and there will most likely be a follow-up next year. We'd like to thank everyone who participated and wish our customers good luck with their new ideas!

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