Consumer Culture, Branding and Identity in the New Russia

From Five-year Plan to 4x4

Graham Roberts, Graham H.J. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415722407
• eBook ISBN: 9781317936312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

As shopping has been transformed from a chore into a major source of hedonistic pleasure, a specifically Russian consumer culture has begun to emerge that is unlike any other. This book examines the many different facets of consumption in today's Russia, including retailing, advertising and social networking. Throughout, emphasis is placed on the inherently visual - not to say spectacular - nature both of consumption generally, and of Russian consumer culture in particular.

Particular attention is paid to the ways in which brands, both Russian and foreign, construct categories of identity in order to claim legitimacy for themselves. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how consumer culture is being reinvented in Russia today, in a society which has one, nostalgic eye turned towards the past, and the other, utopian eye, set firmly on the future.

Borrowing concepts from both marketing and cultural studies, the approach throughout is interdisciplinary, and will be of considerable interest, to researchers, students and practitioners wishing to gain invaluable insights into one of the most lucrative, and exciting, of today's emerging markets.

1 From Red Square to Nike Town

Re-enchanting the retail experience

Introduction: The curious tale of the giant steamer trunk in the night

In November 2013, Muscovites awoke to find a bizarre and unfamiliar structure, the size of a small block of flats, installed in the middle of Red Square. The object in question was a giant replica of a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, designed to accommodate an exhibition tracing the French luxury brand’s history. Both the exhibition and the trunk were the brainchild of managers at GUM, the department store lining one side of Red Square, who intended it to be part of the celebrations marking the store’s 120th anniversary (Vuitton’s GUM store currently extends over two floors). Historical items belonging to the Romanov family were to be among the exhibits of ‘Soul of Travel’, a show organised to raise funds for a children’s charity run by Russian model Natal’ya Vodyanova, the girlfriend of Antoine Arnauld, son of LVMH’s chairman, Bernard. Plans for the exhibition were quickly abandoned, however, and the Vuitton trunk dismantled, after a series of complaints. Muscovites and tourists alike objected to the fact that the structure blocked the view of iconic landmarks such as St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. Some Russian MPs lambasted Vuitton for installing the trunk next to Lenin’s mausoleum, thereby trivialising a ‘sacred space’. One Duma deputy went so far as to accuse the firm of undermining the very foundations of the Russian state by ‘deriding and mocking’ Red Square. Not even the (rather incongruous) presence of the Russian flag running all the way down the sides of the trunk could prevent public figures such as media celebrity Maksim Vitorgan from describing it as a ‘symbol of vulgarity’.¹

The furore surrounding Vuitton’s installation tells us much about contemporary Russia. For one thing, it reminds us of the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor in the country today. A report by investment bank Credit Suisse published just a month prior to the Vuitton controversy found that Russia had the highest rate of income inequality anywhere in the world, with 35% of household wealth in the hands of just 110 individuals (Credit Suisse 2013). It also highlights the fact that in post-socialist Russia, political considerations often have a significant impact on both the shape and the direction of consumer culture. It is true that this was also a feature of late Imperial Russia (West 2011; Hilton 2012), and even of the USSR at certain key moments (Gronow 2003; Hessler 2004; Randall 2008; Chernyshova 2013). One might also add that it is by no means an exclusively Russian phenomenon; as Cohen (2003) and others have argued, ideological considerations were key to the emergence of mass consumption in post-War America (on post-War France, see Pulju 2011). Nevertheless, the politicisation of consumer culture (and its corollary, the commodification of political culture) has reached unprecedented levels under Putin’s leadership (Kravets 2012; Goscilo 2013a; Roberts 2014a; Sperling 2015; on this process in China, see Zhao and Belk 2008). Vuitton’s steamer trunk, and the controversy it sparked, is symptomatic of this process. The French brand’s choice of Red Square is itself highly significant. To paraphrase Miles (2010), as under Stalin, so under Putin, Red Square has become the ultimate ‘space for consumption’ in contemporary Russia. In recent years, it has been the site of open-air equestrian shows, live opera performances, music festivals and – since November 2011 – Soviet-style military parades (Oushakine 2013). Whatever their differences, both these parades and Vuitton’s ill-fated exhibition put on display the Great Russian Past, something Russians are currently being invited to consume without moderation on an almost daily basis.

As for Vuitton’s over-size trunk itself, it can be read in a number of different ways. On the one hand, it points metonymically to the enduring popularity of luxury, and foreign luxury brands, in Russia today (Kulikova and Godart 2014). At the same time, it serves as a metaphor for the spectacular excess at the heart of contemporary Russian consumer culture. Indeed, Vuitton’s installation is emblematic of the extent to which post-socialist Russia has transformed itself into Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’. This is a society in which ‘the commodity [la merchandise] completely takes over social life [… and] is all we see’ (Debord 1992: 39, author’s italics, our translation). As spectacle, Vuitton’s trunk may be viewed as an attempt to introduce the mythical and indeed the sacred into the mundane and profane arena of Muscovites’ daily lives (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry Jnr 1989). One could argue that the trunk re-enchants not just consumers’ day-to-day existence, however, but also consumption itself, in the sense understood by Badot and Filser. As they put it: ‘Re-enchantment of consumption can be defined as a set of practices initiated by both manufacturers and consumers to incorporate non-functional sources of values in goods and services, and turn them into hedonic, symbolic, and interpersonal value’ (Badot and Filser 2007: 167). The trunk neatly encapsulates the three different ‘sources of value’ mentioned here; designed as an essentially hedonic experience, the trunk symbolises new Russia’s break with the (increasingly distant) Communist past, while at the same time promoting interpersonal links between individual Russian consumers via an appeal to a shared heritage, namely the Romanov dynasty. In effect, these consumers are invited to consume this heritage, just like any other ‘product’.

It is this ‘re-enchantment’ of consumption in contemporary Russia, and more specifically the re-enchantment of retailing, that will be the focus of this chapter. However, before we look more closely at some of the many forms this re-enchantment has taken, we need to explain how we understand the concept itself. Essentially, it involves downplaying the mercantile, transactional nature of consumption, and focusing instead on the consumer’s emotional experience. Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) were among the first to point out that consumption does not merely involve rational information processing in the search for goods or services. Instead, they argue, many consumers also look to indulge their creativity and feel positive emotions when out shopping. It is only, they maintain, by looking at this experiential aspect of consumption – shoppers’ ‘fantasies, feelings, and fun’, as they put it – that researchers and indeed retailers themselves can reach an adequate understanding of consumer behaviour (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982: 139; see also Babin, Darden and Griffin 1994).²

This insistence on the need to focus on the more intangible aspects of consumption – the aesthetic, the ludic and the hedonic – nods implicitly to an earlier article by Kotler (1973), which foregrounded the importance of store atmospherics in the retail marketing mix. What is especially interesting, however, is that it coincided not so much with the rise of new retail experiences, as with the coming into fashion among cultural theorists of the concept of ‘postmodernism’ (see for example Jameson 1984 and Lyotard 1984).³ While Holbrook and Hirschman do not refer explicitly to ‘postmodernism’, this concept was central to the article, inspired by their work, in which the notion of ‘re-enchanting consumption’ first appeared, almost a decade and a half later. In that article, Firat and Venkatesh claimed that in the ‘modern’ era (which they suggest runs from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century up to the present day), the consumer has been reduced to ‘a reluctant participant in a rational economic system that affords no emotional, symbolic, or spiritual relief’ (Firat and Venkatesh 1995: 240). Reminding us that the postmodern age is supposed to sound the death knell for all metanarratives, they continue: ‘the postmodern quest is therefore to “reenchant human life” and to liberate the consumer from a repressive rational/technological scheme’ (Firat and Venkatesh 1995: 240). As this comment makes abundantly clear, re-enchanting consumption and re-enchanting life are for Firat and Venkatesh ultimately the same thing. Citing not just Holbrook and Hirschman, but also the work of Debord, and Baudrillard (1994) they maintain: ‘as the consumption sector turns more and more toward the consumption of images, the society at large becomes more and more a society of spectacle’ (Firat and Venkatesh 1995: 250). And, they argue, it is precisely by embracing the spectacular, the symbolic and the experiential aspects of consumption, that the consumer will become the producer of her own experience, and thereby of her own self/ves (see also Firat and Dholakia 1998; Kozinets et al. 2004). For Firat and Venkatesh this is where the ‘liberatory’ potential of postmodern consumption ultimately lies.

While some have criticised Firat and Venkatesh’s narrative (see for example Holt 2002), their faith in the power of consumer agency has nevertheless found a significant echo among marketing academics and practitioners alike. As Carù and Cova have put it:

Since the 1960s and 1970s, consumption has progressively disengaged from its essentially utilitarian conception, one that was based on products’ and services’ use value. Consumption has become an activity that involves a production of meaning, as well as a field of symbolic exchanges. (Carù and Cova 2007: 4)

This notion of the consumer as ‘producer’ recalls de Certeau’s (1984) claim that individuals continually re-appropriate objects in new and unintended ways, actively transforming their cultural meanings via a process of customisation (or ‘bricolage’) as part of their personal self-identity project (see also Miller 1987).⁴ More recently, the relationship between the ‘productive’ consumer and the re-enchantment of consumption has been explored by George Ritzer (see for example Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Ritzer takes up Max Weber’s point that modern society is driven by the move towards rationalisation, and as such is characterised by disenchantment (Weber 1978). More specifically, he describes the relentless drive for efficiency, predictability, calculability and control in today’s, post-Fordist (Western) world. He takes McDonald’s as the archetypical example of this process, which he labels ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 1993). For Ritzer, McDonaldization has produced widespread disenchantment, since it leaves no room for the magical or the mysterious in consumption (Sassatelli 2007: 174–77). In response, stores, malls, and indeed many other forms of what Ritzer calls ‘new means of consumption’, such as casinos, cruise liners and even sports stadia, all attempt to re-enchant the consumer. They do this by various means, collectively described by Ritzer (2010: xiv) as ‘spectacle and extravaganza through the use of simulations, implosion, and manipulations of time and space’ (see also Lipovetsky 2006). In other words, in an increasingly wide variety of settings, the consumption experience is designed so as to give the consumer the impression of transcending time and space (Miles 2010: 177). However, these commercialised and pre-packaged ‘simulations’, the purpose of which is to create an almost religious sense of wonder for the consumer, are never enough, and ultimately leave the consumer continually dissatisfied with the show on offer in these ‘cathedrals of consumption’. The result, Ritzer maintains, is an endless cycle of enchantment–disenchantment–re-enchantment (Thompson 2006).

A rather different view of the re-enchantment of consumption has been put forward by Badot and Filser (2007). Their approach is at once narrower than Ritzer’s (since they focus on retailing), and deeper, since they maintain that re-enchantment does not necessarily involve the extraordinary or the spectacular (Badot and Filser 2007: 167–68). On the contrary, they suggest that it may be produced by quite ‘ordinary’ experiences, such as discovering special price promotions in a hard-discount store, or interacting socially with other shoppers (Badot and Filser 2007: 168). As part of their argument, they propose a typology of four re-enchantment strategies. These are organised along two axes, first, contingent/non-contingent, and second, street corner/conspicuous. This gives the following four strategies:

• Strategy 1: non-contingent and conspicuous

• Strategy 2: contingent and conspicuous

• Strategy 3: contingent and street corner

• Strategy 4: non-contingent and street corner

The second axis, street corner/conspicuous, is particularly noteworthy, as it runs from those strategies designed to produce a ‘euphoric’ experience more or less independently of the consumer’s needs (as in the Mall of America in Minneapolis for example) – to those, ‘rooted in the microevents constituting our daily lives’ (Badot and Filser 2007: 170). The latter strategy may, Badot and Filser argue, be seen for example in Wal-Mart, whose stores are designed to reproduce the various stages of the life cycle, to romanticise popular culture, and to promote ordinary shoppers as ‘local heroes’ (Badot and Filser 2007: 172–73). Crucially, Badot and Filser do not share Ritzer’s pessimism concerning the capacity of the consumer to be endlessly ‘enchanted’. They focus (implicitly) on the liberal democracies of North America and Western Europe – as indeed do virtually all those who have written on the re-enchantment of consumption. Yet their point about the possibility of ‘ordinary’ re-enchantment, and their strategy typology, are particularly relevant to the development of retailing in post-socialist Russia.

It would of course be simplistic in the extreme to assume that Russia – and indeed the other former Soviet republics – have spent the last few years merely aping Western consumer culture wholesale (indeed, part of the interest of looking at Russia lies in exposing the limits of a set of theories developed in an almost exclusively Western context). As Sassatelli observes, ‘each of these countries has come to confront global commodities, commercial processes and consumerist discourses in a particular moment and from a particular position, concocting its own culture of consumption’ (Sassatelli 2007: 47). Post-socialist Russia in particular is characterised by what Mansvelt (2005: 52) refers to as a ‘hybridity of forms, practices and constructions of consumption’ that do not always conform to the ‘standard framework’ discussed in much of the literature. Nevertheless, Russia has a long, and well-documented history of trying to ‘catch up with’, and ultimately overtake the West economically, going back at least to Peter the Great (Kochan 1962; Hughes 1998). Nowhere has this desire to outplay the West at its own game been more evident in recent years than in the high streets, shopping malls and outlet villages of Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Rostov-on-Don and countless other Russian cities. This is perhaps not surprising, since, as Twitchell (1999: 240) wryly observes, ‘of all the freedoms demanded by Central [sic] Europe in the 1980s – freedom of individual speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press – the most cauterizing was the freedom to shop.’ Indeed, given the recent huge rise in consumer credit mentioned in our introduction, nowhere in Central and Eastern Europe does Twitchell’s ‘freedom to shop’ appear to have been more coveted (and more enthusiastically exploited), than in Russia. To quote Kramer (2013a):

Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post-Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized. Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers [spending] 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases.

It is to Russia, and the re-enchantment of retailing under way in that country since 1992, that we now turn.

Retailing in Russia, 1885–1991: From enchantment to disenchantment

The Vuitton steamer trunk with which we began was erected in 2013 to celebrate the 120th anniversary of GUM,⁵ the department store which extends along one side of Red Square, directly opposite the Kremlin. GUM was not actually founded 120 years earlier in 1893, however. In that year, the ‘Upper Trading Rows’ – the building that eventually came to be known as GUM – reopened in Moscow. By the 1880s, the Rows had become a place of ‘dirt, darkness, and general disrepair’ (Hilton 2012: 37). As Hilton has observed, when they reopened in December 1893, they were intended to be ‘a new kind of civic space where merchants could pursue an enlightened, ethical trade and residents, a civilized way of life’ (Hilton 2012: 50). GUM was not the first Russian department store, however. This honour went to Muir and Merrilies, which opened in Moscow in 1885 (it is today one of Moscow’s most chic stores, although it is still referred to by its Soviet name ‘TsUM’, which stands for ‘Tsentralnyi Universalnyi Magazin’, or ‘Central Universal Store’). In the late nineteenth century, Muir and Merrilies closely resembled the numerous department stores that had begun to appear in North America and Western Europe ever since Aristide Boucicaut’s Le Bon Marché had opened in Paris in 1852. Like its counterparts elsewhere (and indeed GUM), it saw its role not just as selling goods to the growing urban middle class, but also and most importantly as bringing enlightenment to society (Smith and Kelly 1998).⁶

If anything, this desire to ascribe a mission salvatrice to sites of consumption intensified during the Soviet period, and especially under Stalin. As Randall (2008: 1) notes: ‘retail trade and consumption were heralded as not only central to the socialist revolution but also the stage upon which the limits of capitalism would be exposed’. As a result, a series of model shops were opened in the 1930s in cities throughout the country – many in the sumptuous buildings of pre-revolutionary stores (Hilton 2012). They were filled with a dizzying array of the latest Soviet consumer goods, alongside luxury items such as smoked fish, caviar and champagne (Gronow 2003; Hessler 2004). Standards of service too were raised to unprecedented levels, in a drive to encourage ‘cultured’ consumption (Randall 2008). A mail order service was even introduced in some stores in the 1950s (Goldman 1960: 14–15).

However, even the visit to Moscow in 1959 of Christian Dior, invited to show off his latest collection (Fitzpatrick 2012) could not hide the fact that consumption was by this time slipping rapidly down the Soviets’ list of priorities. For Khrushchev, catching up with the West could only be achieved through massive investment in agriculture and heavy industry (Nove 1984). Manufacturing consumer goods, and creating an efficient distribution network for those goods, now came a poor second to producing tractors, tanks and space rockets, as French retail historian Étienne Thil once famously put it (Thil 2000: 254). As a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. From Red Square to Nike Town: Re-enchanting the retail experience
• 2. From Superman to the Invisible Man: Imagining the male body in contemporary Russian advertising
• 3. The politics of packaging in post-socialist Russia: Labels, logos, locations
• 4. The final frontier: Brands and branding on social media in the new Russia
• Afterword, or the cautionary tale of Diana, Lada, Myusya – and Vlad
• References
• Index