Introduction speech from Alina Serbanica, ESOMAR representative for Romania.
The paper discusses the benefit of the introducing of the health insurance system in the Czech Republic. It explains the role of particular subjects of the system : government, health insurance companies, providers of the health care and clients. These findings are partly based on the secondary data. The paper also summarizes the results which were obtained through the primary research. The survey with standard structured questionnaire has been led in Moravia region (the important part of the Czech Republic with 3 million of inhabitants) last year. The sample size was 609 respondents. The quota sampling was formed in respect of the sex, age, education, place of living and gross income of household.
This paper discusses the assumptions implicit in much advertising used in Western European countries and how these are not always appropriate to what are often new markets in Central and Eastern Europe. In the same was as all Western European countries cannot be considered similar and may require different advertising, the same is TRUE when considering markets further East. It examines what are the sources of acquisition of knowledge, such as TV and films (often American), what can be taken as shared knowledge and what cannot, and how this is likely to affect understanding and interpretation of the images presented in advertising. Examples are given from recent research carried out in a number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
A lot has already been said here about changes. Changes in the economy, in aspirations and social values, changes in attitudes, changes in consumer behaviour, changes in producers behaviour. Retail and wholesale trade belonged to the areas where the radical developments of the early 90s changed the situation dramatically. The Czech Republic can be given as an example. In the past, the patterns of Czech retailing corresponded with the state of the whole economy - low amounts of selling space, inconvenient retail structures and the consumer in an inferior role. After the fall of the communist regime a principal economic transition started. Privatisation has entirely changed the ownership structure and both the retail and wholesale network have become enormously fragmented. Now a re- concentration process has been started. These developments go hand in hand with changes in the quality of retail supply and are supported by a large influx of international chains.
This paper is devoted to a discussion of the influence of high inflation economies dominated in most countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on the choice of marketing strategy and the ways to measure the speed of inflation. The first section of the paper outlines the distinction between objective and subjective aspects of inflation and discusses the main consequences of the two on the choice of marketing strategy. It shows that if objective inflation operates on a macro-economic level and affects the general marketing environment, the subjective speed of inflation (inflationary expectations) has an impact on patterns of consumer behavior and other psychological variables. This paper reviews different approaches of measuring the objective and subjective speed of inflation from the early method up to including new techniques. The empirical background consists of a series of cross-section and panel studies conducted by the Institute for Comparative Social Research (Moscow, Russia) between 1991-1994. New ways to overcome traditional difficulties of measuring objective inflation using the Consumer Price Index are introduced.
The paper aims at providing an overview of the results of the transformation process after five years, with the emphasis on failures rather than on achievements. The bias is deliberate, aiming at better exposing problems and resulting policy challenges currently confronted by the transition countries. The analysis is limited to six central European transition countries, chiefly because both their history and recent economic performance have been shaped by broadly similar factors, in contrast to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia. Expectations raised by the collapse of communism are briefly summarized in section 2 and are followed in section 3 by a discussion of main outcomes of the transformation process. Section 4 concludes.
This paper is analysing the micro-economic behaviour of households in seven post- Communist societies: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The first chapter of the paper is describing the structure and the activities of the Austrian Paul Lazarsfeld-Society, the second chapter is describing the cross-national and annual survey-research-programme NEW DEMOCRACIES BAROMETER, which forms the data basis of this paper. The third chapter deals with the economic situation of households in 1994 compared with the situation under the command economy before 1989 whereas the fourth chapter is describing the subjective satisfaction with the economic situation of the household in 1994. Chapter 5 is analysing the financial situation of post-Communist households in general, a specific theme of the actual financial situation is dealt with in chapter 6 which is explaining how households are getting by with a regular income within the official economy. The concluding chapters deal with micro-economic expectations for the future: chapter 7 is describing the expected economic situation of the household in five years time, whereas chapter 8 is rounding up the paper by showing the extent of optimism and pessimism on the micro- economic level in post-Communist societies.
The paper concentrates primarily on the development of the Estonian consumer market in 1992-1994, the first years of free market economy. The changes in the market are examined from the point of view of different indicators: objective ones, such as living standard and purchasing power, and those with subjective character, such as attitudes affecting brand consumption and buying behaviour. The data are from continuous surveys, such as household panel, advertising expenditure survey, target group index survey and brand monitoring, carried out by EMOR and its affiliates, Baltic Media Facts and Baltic Market Facts. Clearly in the following few years, the first markets to develop in Estonia will be those for food and essential commodities.
We have focused our attention in this study on the situation with daily commodities. Food, beverages and chemical products are bought most frequently, hence it is well possible to examine consumer preferences with regard to international versus local brands of goods on the basis of these articles. For all analyses, we had data from GfK-Household panels in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland over a period of twenty-four months at our disposal. Panel data does not reflect opinions and attitudes, but rather describes actual purchase behavior.
In this paper we describe the findings of major global study as they apply to Central and Eastern Europe. It is divided into two parts. In the first part we describe some of the technical issues involved in conducting so large a study in this region. In particular we describe the very high response rates, and discuss how these were achieved. In the second part we analyse the development of brands and branding within the region. Our principal findings are that local brands, particulalrly in the Czech Republic, are much more strongly entrenched than many people have supposed. Not only are they very well-known, but in most countries they are also very well-regarded. We therefore expect Western brands will encounter stem resistance in their attempts to conquer these markets. This is encouraging news for local brands and businesses. Our research also indicates that brands are evaluated in different ways in different countries, and suggests that global brands will have to be sensitively adapted to the specific needs of Central and Eastern Europe if they are to succeed.
This paper describes the development of the model to deal with changes in one of the organisations so far studied in Slovenia. It has been an achievement of the type of model used that this process could all be accommodated. However, it emerged that for satisfactory results it was necessary to incorporate processes outside the enterprise itself, in the external environment: political, legal, social, economic; it was also clear that the severe market challenges faced by the organisation were of influence in dictating the speed of change and providing a rationalisation of it, but did not appear to have influenced its direction to the extent or in a way that would be expected in a Western corporate situation.