Ukraine's realities are not as bad as its image abroad. So, to help foreigners forget about fistfights in parliament and gas wars with Russia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has paid $100,000 to a private company to develop a positive branding strategy. But instead of supporting the initiative, many Ukrainians are indignant about it.
The heaviest criticism is leveled at two cartoon characters, Sprytko and Harnyunya, which will soon adorn refrigerator magnets and t-shirts, among other souvenirs.
CFC Consulting, the Kyiv-based company that rolled out their creation on March 24, found critics ranging from Deputy Prime Minister Borys Kolesnikov to eccentric Russian designer Artemiy Levedev. Some think the mascots look like Japanese anime characters. Others noted that that the company won the contract without any competitive tender.
This reaction seems natural in a country where authorities are routinely suspected of misspending billions of dollars in public funds.
CFC Consulting team from left: senior advisor Oleksiy Syvak, partner Vasyl Myroshnychenko and partner Konstantin Gridin in their office. (Joseph Sywenkyj)
A recent example involves Kyiv City Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky, fingered by City Administrator Oleksandr Popov for costing the city Hr 70 billion through giveaways of 779 hectares of land.
On the national scale, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been charged with wrongfully diverting funds raised under the Kyoto Protocol to the pension fund.
We were neither trying to create an anatomically precise copy of a Ukrainian with all the right proportions nor a wax sculpture for Madame Tussauds museum. We just made a souvenir.”
– Yuriy Sak, the creative director from the CFC.
PR companies facelifting the country’s image have also run into controversies in the past. In 2005, Kharkiv-based Konglomerat won a bid and received nearly $2.5 million from the Foreign Ministry to create a positive attitude towards Ukraine abroad. Other companies, including CFC Consulting, filed a lawsuit against the ministry but lost.
This time the spotlight is on the CFC, the company managed and run by Western-educated young PR professionals. They said they didn’t expect so much discussion of two cartoon characters who “make up no more than 2-3 percent from the whole strategy.”
Partner Vasyl Myroshnychenko said that a major part of the project is devoted to “promoting Ukraine as a filming ground, the center for modern art and business opportunities.”
Nevertheless, Sprytko and Harnyunya took a beating for the whole campaign. Their eyes, hairstyles, costumes and names, which seem hard to pronounce for non-native speakers, were all fair game – nothing escaped critics’ attention.
Kolesnikov said it looked liked the characters had been designed by “the veterans from the Foreign Ministry or Reich.” Russian designer Lebedev observed signs of mental illnesses in the “location of the iris on the eyeball.”
I lived in England for a long time, worked with international students, and I am aware of various peculiarities of different languages.”
– Yuriy Sak, the creative director from the CFC.
In response, designers studied other famous cartoon characters, such as “Mishka” bear mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympics and a leopard for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and found similar eye patterns.
“We were neither trying to create an anatomically precise copy of a Ukrainian with all the right proportions nor a wax sculpture for Madame Tussauds museum. We just made a souvenir,” said Yuriy Sak, the creative director from the CFC.
Consultants also reassure that foreigners will not have any problems pronouncing names Sprytko and Harnyunya. “I lived in England for a long time, worked with international students, and I am aware of various peculiarities of different languages,” Sak said.
Tastes differ when it comes to appearances, but when public money is involved, the pressure’s on.
Russian designer Artemiy Lebedev. (Yaroslav Debelyi)
“We chose CFC Consulting because they are a respected player on the market. Sadly, it’s hard to trust tenders when it comes to branding campaigns,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Voloshyn in comments to the online news site Tochka.
We chose CFC Consulting because they are a respected player on the market. Sadly, it’s hard to trust tenders when it comes to branding campaigns.”
– Oleh Voloshyn, Foreign Ministry spokesman.
CFC jumped on the offer because “it was a matter of honor,” said Myroshnychenko. “We spent most of the money received and earned practically nothing.” According to the CFC ledger, half the budget was spent on printing brochures and posters, $12,000 to conduct surveys across five continents and the rest on wages and administrative expenses.
This is not the company’s first branding project. In 2002, they worked to include Ukraine to the Euronews weather map and Eurovision Song Contest competition. But their critics are unrelenting.
CFC Consulting seems to enjoy extra publicity, even if some of it has been tarnished. “The mascots for Euro-2012 were developed by a world famous company Warner Brothers and they received large criticism,” said Myroshnychenko. “If the company that knows what it is doing drew so much negative feedback, we take the criticism as a compliment.”
But at any rate, no branding strategy can be effective unless there are grounds for positive associations. Myroshnychenko agrees that Ukraine has huge problems with corruption, among many other things, but “at the same time we have 46 million people, a massive territory, resources and many talents [that the world should know about.]”
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Horban can be reached at [email protected].
