The KupiVip.ru shopping club promotion project

The RMA students under the direction of the trainers of the Internet Industry Management course Dmitriy Stepanov ("Afisha"), Sonya Sokolova (Zvuki.Ru, Soundkey.ru), Tatyana Tsvetkova (Softkey), Nikolay Mitushin (ABRT venture fund), Katerina Tikhonova (WOM advertising agency) and Vitaliy Bykov and Vasiliy Lebedev (Red Keds Creative Agency) worked on promoting the KupiVip.ru shopping club at the moment of its entrance on the market.

The project goal was to carry out a successful advertising campaign for the KupiVip.ru project which at that moment had just started to gain a position on the Russian market. The students from the program were separated into six working groups and got for their use an advertising budget of 200 thousand rubles and a carte blanche for the most unusual ways of attracting the customers to the shopping club.

Oskar Hartmann, the general director of KupiVip.ru, summed up the results of the project thus:

"We are very pleased with this project. Even before it started, I decided that if we got 12 thousand registrations, the project could be considered very good, if less than 6 thousand, we’d consider it unsuccessful, and if more than 20 thousand, fantastic. At this moment this project attracted about 8 thousand registrations with each one costing less than 100 rubles. The starting budget isn’t even completely spent, and the customers keep registering. So I consider this project to be a success.

“As to the students’ work, everyone worked through the first stage very well, the theoretical part was done very professionally. A huge number of ideas was generated, with no repeating ones except for contextual advertising. By the way, it was a surprise to us to see that contextual advertising was so effective. In US and Europe, for example, a customer attracted by contextual advertising costs a lot. We also realized that it’s almost impossible to make the offline advertising for our club effective.

The results of this project are very important for us since one of its main goals was to try a hundred of different methods to choose a final money investment strategy. Now we will try to realize all the ideas generated by the participants of the competition. Right now we have received a tranche for 8 million US dollars, and now we will be moving ahead quickly".