Heritage Marketing of the Babaevsky Confectionery Concern

Abstract

The thesis reconstructs the history of the Babaevsky Confectionary Concern, one of the most important Russian companies in the food sector, from its origins, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, to recent days. The aim of the work is 1) to understand how the corporate history is used by the Russian company for its marketing strategies and 2) to understand if and how the use of its heritage has been critical in allowing Babaevsky to remain competitive in the course of the last twenty years. The first chapter presents the detailed history of the Babaevsky Confectionary Concern from its foundation during the Russian Empire, through the Soviet times until the privatization following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The last part of the chapter analyses the current production and the positioning of the Babaevsky concern in the Russian Federation. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of Babaevsky's brand and its internal and external corporate image. The same is done for one of the company's main competitors - JSC Rossiya Confectionary. The last part of the chapter provides the readers with a comparison between Babayevsky’s image and its rival’s image. Moreover, within the chapter, the organizations’ use of brand heritage in their marketing activities has been highlighted. The third and final chapter illustrates the methodology and the results of the field research performed for the Babaevsky concern. I created an online questionnaire with the aim of finding out which brand perception, and brand recognition the audience has toward the Babaevsky company. Another goal was to check the innovativeness of the organization’s communications and understand if the concern uses its heritage for marketing its goods.