Figuring out what detergent the average Ukrainian housewife buys might be dull work for most people, but GfK-USM really cares. They get paid to.
GfK-USM Ukrainian Surveys and Market Research (GfK-USM), as the name implies, does market research in Ukraine, mostly for the likes of Unilever and Phillip Morris.
These daring multinationals, in good part because that's what they do everywhere else, want to market their products in Ukraine.
But to tap into the pocketbooks of those 50 million consumers, they need information.
'What exactly will sell in Ukraine? And who will buy it?' said Oleksandr Fedorysyn, GfK-USM Director. 'Our job is to answer these questions.'
GfK-USM (originally just USM) was founded by two Ukrainians in the summer 1995. Its six staff members crammed into a cheap room rented on Kyiv's outskirts; company assets included one computer, a telephone, a fax, moderate collective experience in programming or psychology, and a general conviction that market research could be performed in Ukraine for profit.
Today, in its fourth office space in five years, GfK-USM employs 49 full-time and about 1,000 part-time field researchers. The firm's bread-and-butter business, conducted for 100 plus clients including Fortune 500 firms, still comes down to staffers knocking on apartment doors asking questions.
But GfK-USM has grown continually – even when the 1998 financial crisis hit, Fedoroshin said. Product line has expanded from market research to product testing, telephone surveys, and focus groups. In 1999 a big Austrian market research company called Fessel GfK Gmbh bought the founding partners out. These days GfK-USM monitors 2,000 households scattered across Ukraine, each providing daily feedback on what commercials members watched last night – and why.
'I would say that the techniques we use are no different from anywhere else,' Fedorysyn said. 'Though frankly, in the beginning, we didn't understand the most sophisticated approaches … but we worked hard, our customers helped us, and we learned.'
Building what Fedorysyn calls Ukraine's largest home-grown market research company (market analysts say four or five firms are in the business) was not always easy. Ukrainians with purchasing power these days usually grew up in the Soviet Union, where strangers asking questions really could be secret police agents.
Even today, Ukrainians don't like to talk about personal income because of fears the tax police or thuggish neighbors might swoop in and swipe the family TV.
Another difficulty in Ukrainian market research is that, 40 percent of the time, the consumers don't have phones. That means GfK-USM staffers, to generate data, must knock on doors and engage cagey fellow countrymen in conversation.
'I get people to talk to me about 80 percent of the time,' said Katya Kudrina, GfK-USM researcher. 'It's all a matter of getting the interview subject to trust you.'
Kudrina is a foot soldier in Ukrainian consumerism. She lives in the village of Vasilkov, population 12,000, a half hour's drive west of Kyiv. Obviously, she doesn't know all fellow villagers personally, but Kudrina says her town is small enough so that she usually can convince neighbors to answer a few questions.
'If we all attended the same school or both have relatives working at the same factory,' she said, 'then of course a person is more willing to help me with my survey.'
The thing is, she can't just ask anyone. Researching markets is sophisticated science, and field researchers must obtain answers from statistically representational respondents.
Since one-third of Ukraine's population is of pension age, and men tend to die younger than women, Kudrina spends a good part of her workday talking to Vasilkiv's babushkas.
'Very smart. I know of no consumer group that is as good at counting its kopecks,' Kudrina said. 'Of course, some of them are very talkative – they don't have many visitors. So sometimes I have to cut the interview short, just so I can go on to my next one.'
Typically, Kudrina asks 20 to 30 questions about a product or marketing drive. They can be as specific as 'What's your favorite chocolate bar?' or as general as 'What commercials do you remember?'
Once Kudrina and her fellow pollsters turn in the questionnaires to the central office, Vladislav Minko helps crunch the data.
Besides compiling poll responses, one of the services that GfK-USM provides, is establishing the facts of the Ukrainian market. Primarily, Minko and three other number specialists dig through statistical data generated by Ukraine's State Statistics Committee and try to make heads or tails of it.
'A lot of what the government provides isn't meaningful in any case,' Minko said. 'Even less so when the question has to do with business.'
Take men's shirts. About a year ago GfK-USM fielded a request from a German apparel retailer: Could you please find out how many men's shirts are made in Ukraine, and how many Ukrainians wind up wearing them?
'It turns out, the government doesn't keep that kind of statistic,' Fedoroshin said. 'And no one knows how many shirts suitcase traders bring into the country that the government doesn't see.'
That particular question remains open. But usually, Minko and his three fellow programmers receive enough data to create statistically reliable spreadsheet conclusions. Some were not just interesting to the customer.
'Someone wanted to know what the ideal man was for our Ukrainian girls,' Minko said. 'It turns out he should be tall, have blue eyes, stay home with the children, and make lots of money.'
Minko and the other guys in the computer room expressed confusion at how one would take care of children at home and earn money simultaneously.
If the customer asking the questions is a multinational, usually GfK-USM does little more than ask what corporate headquarters wants. The price usually works out to $100 to $300 per question. Ukrainian customers are still the minority, and usually their curiosity is narrow.
'We had this fellow, he was wondering whether going into the window-manufacturing business in Kyiv would be profitable,' Fedoroshin recalled. 'So for something like $250 we did a single-question survey. It wasn't … so he didn't.'
Prices are higher for complicated surveys, but lower for large-volume requests. Fedorysyn declined to provide details about overall company income.
One research business GfK-USM doesn't do – unlike competitors Socis Gallup International or the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, for instance – is political polling. According to most political observers, hotly competing candidates for Ukraine's presidency regularly pressure polling companies publishing popularity statistics; GfK-USM's approach has been non-involvement.
'We made a conscious decision to not go for the political business,' Fedoroshin said. 'There was some money there … and we could have done a competent job … but it just wasn't worth the trouble.'
'But finding out more information about Ukrainian business is different,' he added. 'The industry is just beginning.'
