On average, there are more beautiful girls in Tatarstan than in the country as a whole, probably due to the well-known rule in eugenics: at the borders of race mixing, the percentage of beautiful and smart people is always greater, a purely genetic effect operates here

BEAUTY IS A TERRIBLE POWER OF PROMOTION!

If you put Nastassja Kinski or Cindy Crawford behind the counter, you will probably sell any of your goods. This is exactly how the Pirelli company has been selling its tires for almost forty years. Of course, there are other girls behind the counters of their company stores and behind the office counters of their representative offices. But any client, be it a construction worker buying tires for his Mazda, or a wholesale customer from the Buckingham Palace garage buying tires for the Range Rovers of the British royal family, any client, if he is a man, sees behind the counter " Pirelli" one of the Pirelli girls - Pirelli girls, that is, the most famous models in the world

In 1962, the company made a brilliant marketing move, the power of which Pirelli had not yet realized. Especially for the richest and most respected clients from Great Britain, the company prepared a calendar for the next year, 1963, as a Christmas gift. But on the pages of the calendar there were not cars and wheels, but beautiful girls. Terence Donovan of the company's marketing department hoped that customers would hang calendars in their garages, but he miscalculated. Since 1963, the Pirelli girls hang not in garages, but in all the world's largest museums of modern art. They are photographed by the world's leading photographers. Every year filming takes place in some exotic corner of the world. In the Moroccan desert. On the ruins of Carthage. In a Pacific paradise like Bounty. And so on. Such photo expeditions are fantastically expensive. But any potential buyer of tires for their car involuntarily has the thought: since Pirelli has such first-class beauties, the product simply cannot be second-rate. Although in fact the product is a product, no worse and no better than those of other global manufacturers.

The quality of Nizhnekamsk tires has already been discussed in this issue of Ogonyok. In any case, Pirelli is not at all against placing part of its production on the Nizhnekamskshina assembly line. But it’s one thing to produce a quality product, quite another to sell it. These are different professions. That is why three years ago, at the tire plant in Nizhnekamsk, its own trading house “Kamskshina” was created.

But modern trade, especially when you are setting up your own dealer network from scratch, is a rather expensive undertaking. The tire plant did not have free working capital for this. It turned out to be a vicious circle. The Tatneft company came to the rescue. On June 22, 2001, at a meeting of Tatneft shareholders, it was decided to include a trading house from Nizhnekamsk into the company’s orbit. It was renamed the Kama trading house.

First Deputy Director of Kama for financial and commercial activities Rustam Shigapov said that from that moment Nizhnekamsk tire makers, together with Tatneft, began to control the entire market for their products. And he is considerable. The plan for 2002 is to sell 9 million 400 thousand tires for 9.7 billion rubles. This includes the so-called primary equipment, or, more simply, the supply of tires to car factories for new cars coming off the production line. The Kama trading house sells 100 percent of KamAZ vehicles and Oka minicars, 70 percent of the cars of the Izhevsk plant, 6 out of every 10 brand new Zhiguli cars. The orbit of the primary supply of Nizhnekamsk “rubber” includes the Serpukhov plant for the production of minicars “Oka” for the disabled, “Rostselmash” from Rostov-on-Don, and the Yaroslavl Automobile Plant. For 2002-2003, the Kama trading house plans to put one hundred percent of the new Zhiguli cars in its tires and try them on the Urals from UralAZ.

But tires are consumable materials. They, alas, wear out over time. And besides, in our country, with the onset of cold weather, you have to change your tires to winter ones. Here, unfortunately, you cannot conclude an exclusive agreement with every car enthusiast. Everyone has to fight for them in intense competition. Now Nizhnekamsk tires are purchased by 3 out of every 10 car enthusiasts in Russia. This is a very good indicator, considering that there are eleven tire factories in the country. Trading house "Kama" is the leader in sales. But a bad trader is one who does not want to dominate the entire market. And although this goal is, in principle, unattainable, because our country has anti-monopoly laws, the Kama trading house has so far managed to systematically increase its market share. And above all, because Kama’s top managers do not reinvent the wheel, but strictly follow the rules of the game and know their battlefield well.

For example, if the consumers of their products are mostly men, why not play on the most important male quality - the instinctive desire for beauty, if this beauty is embodied in the form of a beautiful girl? Fortunately, there are on average more beautiful girls in Tatarstan than in the whole country, probably due to the well-known rule in eugenics: at the borders of race mixing, the percentage of beautiful and smart people is always higher, a purely genetic effect operates here.

However, the heroine of the calendar of the Kama trading house, Albina Ibragimova (86 - 63 - 92, height 176) never thought about how much blood was mixed in her. She is twenty years old, she is beautiful and smart, in any case, she has a modern, very pragmatic outlook on life. And its story is so reminiscent of Andersen’s famous fairy tale about the ugly duckling that it may seem fictitious. But life sometimes presents such surprises that no storyteller could invent.

It all started with a news ticker on a local television station. The girl came to the selection process for a fashion model school at the Kazan fashion theater “Lik”. There were a lot of girls there, ten people stood on the podium. Of course, they were not known by their names, and those who were selected were called by the color of their clothes. For example, a girl in a red skirt, come down. Then Albina was alone dressed in all white, but she did not understand that it was she who was called, and with the whole crowd she went home in tears. She finally got into the fashion model school, the second time. But a month later there was another test: they were recruiting girls into the theater troupe. But they didn’t take chubby people there. Albina was given two months to lose weight. I had to give up grandma’s pies, run to the gym every day after school, and even fainted. And then, as they say, the reward found its hero. A manager came from a Parisian modeling agency and, based on a photograph, selected Albina to work in Germany at the M4 model company. And then there were victories at the first competition “Miss Tatarstan”, “Crystal Crown of Russia”, where Albina entered the top five, “Miss Russian Radio” in Kazan, where she became the second vice-miss, and finally “Miss Audience Choice” in the final “Miss Russian Radio.” But only when Albina was invited to audition for the Kama calendar did she realize that this advertisement was the most serious offer of her entire career.

A photograph on the cover of a calendar or magazine is considered very important for the model, for her book (by the way, this cover is on the first page of Albina’s book). The Kama calendar now hangs on the walls of the largest companies and government offices.

It is, of course, nice when people admire you and, perhaps, even take an interest in you at “that” level. But for the sales strategy it is much more important that Nizhnekamsk tires are of interest at all levels. That is why the Kama trading house took another step, and also a proven one. They divided Russia, as President Vladimir Putin did in his time, into districts, into dealer territories and built their own trading vertical, which could be easily and effectively managed. For example, the situation on the markets in the central region is studied and traded by Kama-Center. Kama-Neva operates in the North-West. And so on, throughout all federal districts and in Ukraine. Today the export volume has reached 3 million 800 thousand dollars. The best places to buy Nizhnekamsk tires now are in the Middle East, the Czech Republic, Germany and, strange as it may seem, the UK. However, this is probably not so strange: British gentlemen have traditionally never pursued external effect, and they only value quality.

And recently the general director signed an order to develop his own retail network of Nizhnekamsk tires. 12 stores will be opened in Tatarstan alone, and then it will be the turn of other regions of Russia and foreign countries. It is more profitable to sell in your stores. Already now, wholesale sales of Kama provide an average of 2.5 - 3 percent of profit, and retail sales are immediately 17 percent.

In a word, the first “Miss Tatarstan”, student of the Academy of Foreign Tourism Albina Ibragimova, has a great future.

Sergey PETUKHOV