Dmitry Linkov

Ok guys, back to work. After all, I’m almost finished with my studies, and I’m back to blogging.

What I want to show you today is an [bad?] example of rebranding happened in Russia past month. One of the biggest telecommunication company made a rebranding. Now their logotype is…. an egg. It’s subsidiaries also use Egg. Between the subsidiaries there is one of 3 gsm operators MTS. You can check out the result here ->. The public was shocked. Everybody started to talk “what an awfull thing they did”.

But what was the result? Till today this only brought to company a big buzz around the mass media. My thoughts firstly were also very negative, but now I just want to say - let’s take a look for it in a while. Only statistics will show if it was a good move or bad. If the buzz will transform into positive cash flow then we can say that it was a good rebranding. Because this is actually why it was conducted.

Yesterday I DEFENDED my master thesis! I finally did it!

Dear friends! I want to say Thank you for your help! Thank you for you letters and ideas, I included almost everything that you’ve wrote to me and this took effect!
Tom O’Leary, Trevor Gay, Chris Houchens, Tom Asacker, Peter Dawson, Carlos Pereira da Cruz, Dustin Staiger, Kostas Panagias - guys you did a great help for me!

Also want to thank my girlfriend Olga for her immense input! In such days all of us need a great support, and I want to thank Olga for her patience, insight and help!

p.s.: so actually I’m back to my blog and to reading yours), there are quiet a lot to read. as for my diploma, we still have to pass two more general exams, but after all that I already passed - it’s nothing! =)

Management’s function is to manage things. And you will not succeed if you won’t be able to find the necessary information. The information search is as I see it just a matter of practice. So I’ll try to give some tips in order to fasten this process:

1. Google advanced search techniques - Johnny Long has a wonderful document on his page “The Google Hacker’s Guide“. You just have to read it (at least half of it). Google gives you wonderful possibilities that you even haven’t realized about - I used it once collecting some brochures. For me it was necessary to find printed brochures of some companies - I searched on the companies site for PDF documents - the easiest thing, but still not so widely known.
2. Local search engines - don’t hesitate to use them in case you are searching in your own language. It’s proved that often they give better results than Google does, for example in Russian.
3. When you are failing with any software don’t run in search of tutorial in the internet. Use Help system. Sometimes it’s everything that you need to solve your problems.
4. If you are not able to find what you want - ask people. It’s a great resource!

Finally don’t forget about Squidoo, Google Blog search, Technorati, del.icio.us.
And good luck with your search!
Update by Kostas: Also take a look at Wikipedia.

Seth wrote a good post abouy average:

Mass marketing works best when it assumes that everybody in the entire chain is just plain average. Or even a little bit less. 

And the thing is - it’s sometimes so difficult to understand this average people. Especially in Russia. Where average means - bottle of beer every day (sometimes before work), television every evening, young marriages because of children etc.

While being a part of a group of people “above average” and thinking that all this is impossible, when you see examples of the lower average the first thought is - it’s an exclusion. But when you realize that the biggest part of the nation is the same and you have to sell THEM your product - it shocks a bit! No I’m not saying that “everything is bad” but the intellectual level is not quiete high as it could be.
But this is it. And you have to be ready for this working on the mass market. I even think maybe to male some training for young marketers “the life of mass market”?

Heard a colleague talking about her new mp3 player: “First I wanted IPod, but once my friend gave it to me - it’s so difficult! You need Itunes, and it doesn’t open folder as usual…”.

So talking about what is good, or what is bad - good is what you are comfortable with.