nly of high quality durum wheat flour. And of course, there was a deficit of this kind of wheat in the USSR. p> The consequence of all these plus bad management was the poor quality of the pastas manufactured in the USSR.
When later the market was open for foreign manufacturers of pastas the native ones were pushed out of the market since they were non-competitive. p> For several years the market of pastas was saturated with imported products. Only in the last few years the situation began to improve for native manufacturers. This was because the difference in prices between them and the foreign manufacturers they could achieve became more significant and the quality of Russian pastas improved. The industry began to develop. h3> The present situation.
In this section some information that had been available for us before the research was made is given. p> We can say that the Russian manufacturers use and have used price methods of competition mainly. The reasons why they have to do it are the following:
В· Often the product is of low quality;
В· The product is manually packed in most of the cases;
В· The reason which in my opinion is of the highest importance: Russian people have a stereotype which was, as we say, absorbed with the mother's milk: made in the USSR means made badly. That is why Russians have negative attitude towards products manufactured in Russia or Post-Soviet area. It makes people think that anything imported is better. And that is why English on the packaging is a mean of marketing in Russia. We have to break this stereotype if we want to succeed. h3> Products in the market.
We can divide all pastas available into three major categories:
1. Low quality pastas. They are cheap, manufactured in Russia or Byelorussia, made of flour which is not actually for pastas manufacture. [3] Their poor quality can be easily identified by their appearance. They are not smooth and their color is a kind of whitish, not the ultimate specific yellow-gray color of good pasta. Their packaging is always manual. p> 2. Middle quality pastas. This category will include domestic pastas made of good durum wheat flour but packed manually. As a consequence, the only possible method of competition is low price. The low price influences the position of these pastas, though they are more expensive than the ones from the previous category, approximately by 20-25% [4]. p> 3. High quality pastas. This category includes pastas made of high quality durum wheat flour and packed automatically. Most of the high quality pastas are imported. The strongest position in the market belongs to Italian and Finnish pastas. Domestic offerings of these pastas are rare. The best known domestic manufacturer of high quality pastas in the city is "Panna", the former "First pasta factory ". br/>
During the last crisis after August, the 17 th , the foreign manufacturers of pastas had to face problems in Russia. If before the crisis Russian pastas were approximately 20-30% cheaper than imported ones, after the crisis when the economic situation became relatively stable again (in October-November), the imported pastas were two times more expensive than the Russian ones. This relates to all or almost all imported pastas since they cost approximately the same nevertheless they are made in different countries-from Italy to Iran. In addition to this, the price level in Russia increased dramatically during only a few weeks. Many imported goods became 2-3 times more expensive than they were. This means a decrease of real income. Since attitude towards Russian pastas comparatively with the imported ones is negative, we can assume that Russian pastas are inferior goods. This means that even if only the people's income had decrease without any change in price, the consumption of the imported pastas would have reduce in favor of the Russian ones. p> Having applied some microeconomics issues to our analysis we found an interesting detail: we have not only one process which can improve the conditions of Russian manufacturers but two. They are a change in price and a change in income. According to the economist of the LBS Corporation the average increase in prices of foods was about 50%. This means the effect of the second process should have been significant. What this led to was called "pastas boom". According to the information gained with the help of some channels of the LBS Corporation, some big Moscow and Petersburg manufacturers increased their production by three times in September and October comparatively with August. This means the foreign manufacturers which dominated our market became non-competitive and where pushed out of the market. We had to think how should we use this. One of the ideas, as was said before, was to start package automatically, design the appropriate marketing mix for our product, and us...
