Canine timekeeping and other wonders of the expat's East
Jim Lafferty is that rare expatriate: someone who came to Poland in the mid to late 1990s, left, and has now come back. A marketing manager for Procter & Gamble during his previous stay in the country, he is now P&G's country manager.
His return equips him with a context most expat newcomers don't have. So what does Poland look like to him today?
He laughs.
"Every year in Poland is a dog year in the West," he said.
Come again?
No, he's not talking about "dog days" or the doldrums. He's talking about incredibly rapid change. "You know a dog year is the equivalent of seven years (in a human life)," he said.
Poland also continues to be a competitive, cutthroat market. That's partly because "everyone's here. No one has made the choice not to be here," he said. "Everybody has got to be here because Poland is the gateway to the East and is key for Central and Eastern Europe. And it's on the way into the European Union (EU)."
Another huge change is the proliferation of hypermarkets. "When I left, they were coming. Now they're here. Warsaw is very, very competitive," Lafferty said,with some of the hypermarkets offering their own generic products in some fields, thereby intensifying the already severe competition between multinational brands.
That plays out differently according to product categories.
But in one of the staples, detergents, Lafferty said, "it's chaos."
That's not just due to deals but also to the fact that "there is no standard sizing. You need a calculator to understand the sizing/price comparisons," Lafferty said. You can get detergent in a range from 600 gram cartons and 1.5 kilograms to 2.4, 3, 3.6, 5 and 5.4 kilograms. "You see people in the aisles, trying to figure out what the best bargain is," he said. That's hard to do and the off-box sizing here not only complicates life for consumers but will make Poland's competitive stance in the EU tougher as well, he said.
Henkel has already announced it will standardize its sizes "and we're trying to go to three, six and nine-kilogram European sizes. Then, when we are in the EU, we will be competitive," Lafferty said.
He also said there have been two other significant shifts here that make life tough for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) managers: "Incomes are growing but at a much slower rate than before. And there has been a shift from daily (purchases) to durables." Buying on credit has helped grease the skids for that transition. People are now more likely to search for bargain brands rather than be repeat buyers of higher-cost brands.
Australian Ambassador Margaret Adamson has been nudging her country's winemakers to take Poland's market seriously. While those winemakers have had their hands full with mature markets where Australian wines are in demand, she thinks they shouldn't pass up a market of 38 million people that has opened up the way this country's has since 1989, with vodka's dominance increasingly giving way to wine and beer.
In February, Wakefield Wines (which goes under the name of Taylor's in Australia) had a wine tasting at the former Count Rusiecki's palace in Warsaw. That "demonstrated to Australian wine exporters that Poland is already well-launched on the path toward being a country of wine connoisseurs," she said.
Their realization has come none too soon. South African and Chilean competitors are already laying the groundwork to tap into Poland's growing number of wine drinkers.
The early years of the last decade saw the formation of a small organization called the American Friends of Warsaw (AFW), with a membership made up mostly of U.S. business expats and some diplomats.
Today, the AFW has more than 200 members from more than 16 nationalities. The AFW has followed the American Chamber of Commerce, which now includes a significant number of corporate heavy-hitters from multinational corporations with no U.S. links, in opening its membership to non-Americans.
Last month, the AFW put on a gala that showed its strength, not only in party-goers but also in its ability to raise significant amounts of money for charity. The AFW membership gathered a total of $40,000 to equip the pediatric department of Professor Adam Gruca's orthopedic hospital.
An all-female Polish band, Music Service, jazzed up the evening as zl. 11,750 worth of raffle tickets were sold. Proceeds from the tickets made up part of the charitable donation.
PricewaterhouseCoopers donated $6,000 of the total money raised and co-chair John Jeffrey gave the only speech of the night on values.
Judy Shaw said other major donors included Citibank, Coca-Cola, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa, Frito Lay, Gillette, Nationale-Nederlanden, PepsiCo, Philip Morris, Ernst & Young and Universal Leaf Tobacco.
Avon, Colgate Palmolive, Eli Lilly, Optimus and Pillsbury also made donations.
In addition, there were significant "in kind" donors who gave items as raffle prizes. These prizes included hotel suites, brand-name outfits, certificates, cars and car rentals, as well as meals at various contemporary restaurants.
