Don’t know if this is staged, but I have heard stories like this and I have actually seen it myself in Germany with German Cops. Well, cops are also only people like you and me. These seem to be in an academy, but it can also be a fake or someone made these while filming for a TV series or so.

http://fishki.net/comment.php?id=7254

The Domodedovo airfield

Domodedovo is one of the 3 Moscow airports. It’s the most modern and the one that is growing the fastest. I am usually flying out to Germany and Spain from here. Along with many Russian, CIS airlines and Charter companies you’ll find airlines like British Airways, Swiss Air, El Al, Emirates and many others. The star of Domodedovo is the An-222. The largest cargo-airplane in the world. They have 3 of them based here and when you taxi, you often see them parked near the runway, if they are at their homebase. Another star is the well known Boeing 747. Transaero is the first Russian airline operating 747’s and they mainly use it to fly to Tel-Aviv.

I like the website of Domodedovo. It offers you real-time information about departures and arrivals of planes. You can send yourself an email and even SMS with the information of your flight so you know if there are any delays.

They also have Wi-Fi available from Domodedovo and I am actually posting this directly from the gate. Flying out to Germany for a trade-show today ;-)

Its about a year ago, when I first saw an advertising of the company Bork. It claims to be German, but I am German and I don’t know of such a company. Have I been away from home too long and there is some new company in the electronics sector. I doubt it, after all I fly back to Germany about once a month and I frequently visit German electronic markets such as Media Markt or Saturn. No sight of Bork. The companies advertising claims its products are German Quality (not made on Germany, though). On the advertising posters you often find a “Gütesiegel”, which is usually given out by some institute or organization in Germany proofing the Quality of the product to the consumer. Bork’s “Gütesiegel” is just a fake, it doesn’t give you the name of the organization who gave it out. After all its in German language (with grammar mistakes by the way) so most of the Russian consumers won’t be able to read it.

A Bork theme store at Garbushka

I recently asked my German friend Bernd if he knows this firm. He works in Moscow for a large German consumer electronics company and should know a little about the competition. Bernd just laughs and says, you didn’t know that this is common practise in Russia and elsewhere? You just need to open a GmbH (which is a company form, sort of a Limited or Corporation) in Germany and you can claim you are a German company. It doesn’t mean you are producing in Germany, which would give you the famous “Made in Germany”. Basically you can just have a silent company there and that is enough. As long as you have a postal address and you do your tax statements there (for the GmbH, which doesn’t have to have a lot of revenue).

Another big brand Nokia

Bernd says, I should have a look at the label on the bottom of the product itself and it will tell me a lot about it and where it comes from. When we were at Garbushka recently we checked some Bork products. Many of them don’t even have the TUV label, which is mandatory for an electric product that is approved on the German market. TÜV is an independent organization of engineers, which proofs every aspect of a product and makes sure its safe to use for the consumer. Indeed some BORK vacuum cleaners have a TÜV label, which means at least they are safe. But still the products can be (and probably are) produced somewhere in Asia. It just means that the same factory was selling this model (with a different label on it) to a German company and needed to get it approved by TÜV. Most of the products we looked at that day, didn’t even have this TÜV label. Meaning, they never entered the German market.

The German TÜV label guarantees safety = GS

That doesn’t mean that these products are bad. Bork offers everything from DVD players, TV’s, vacuum cleaners, water cookers, and and and. I don’t have a single Bork product in my home and I don’t want to comment on the quality, just on the marketing and branding strategy. Branding is a common thing these days. There are companies like Puma, who don’t have factories anymore. They just buy products (mostly even existing ones already), put their label on it and sell them. They focus on the marketing to give the product a special image. In the case of Puma it’s the “cool”. In case of Bork it’s the “From Germany means Quality”.

A Puma shoe re-painted by the Scrawl Collective (UK)

Most of that stuff is produced somewhere in Asia, where labour is cheap. The funny thing is that the same factories produce products for different brands. If you only stay in your country often you don’t see that, but if you travel and you keep your eyes open you often see the exact same product, but it has another name on it. No, its not a sister company of that brand, but the factory just sold this vacuum cleaner to someone else in that country. And maybe its even much cheaper then, because you pay for that cool image. That sports shoe with the swoosh you just bought for $200 is actually worth $5 or even less. Now add transport and other costs and you’ll get to $10 per pair probably. The rest goes to Nike, which was a pioneer in the branding business. Of course a lot of that money (the $180 difference) goes away from marketing. Hey, someone has to pay for these expensive basketball players and its not Nike, its actually you ;-) OK, the people who work at Nike or Puma also need to make some money and of course taxes must be paid. But do you know, how many pairs of shoes, T-Shirts and other stuff these companies sell? No wonder companies like Puma increase their profits every year and come back with record results.

Links

Something about branding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/070101/brand.html
http://www.allaboutbranding.com/

Why big time branders don’t allow their employees to blog
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001068.html

Naomi Klein wrote a famous book about branding (she is against it!) at the end of the 90’s
http://www.nologo.org/

Seeing the photos on my blog you may wonder, if its always dark in Moscow (at least in the Winter). You’ll rarely find any day-photos taken from me in the winter-time, but that has more of a practical background. I start my workday at 10 AM in the morning and usually end it by 8 PM or later. So usually its dark, when I get out of the house to take some photos. Unless I am on my way to a meeting or have some free time like last weekend (usually I work on weekends as well). Well, here are a few daytime photos of Moscow in the cold. It was about -25C below zero and Sonia didn’t even leave the car, while I shot these. She called me crazy, spending time out in the cold North wind to make photos. Although we wanted to leave earlier, we just got out of the house at 4 PM, which is almost dusk time these days. But in a way it was good, because I really don’t like Moscow at daytime in winter. Its grey and dark, kind of dirty and not very pleasant to look at. Only at night it starts to become magic, when the city gets illuminated. Especially when it’s snowing it looks wonderful and often I feel like being in a fairytale then.

The power plants are running high to produce electricty and heat for the increased demand these days

Souvenier salesman don’t freeze. Not even when its -25 C and windy. Vorobyovy Gory - Sparrow Hills - near the Moscow University

You can find many places for sledding. This is at Vorobyovy Gory.

The frozen Moskva and a view of the Moscow center.

The Novodevichy Cloister. There is a beautiful park with a pond just infront of it. We go for walks here sometimes in the summer. It looks remote on the photo, but is actually in the middle of the city sourrounded by apartment blocks.

The Moskva is frozen now. The building is the Russian White House. Here is it where the tanks rolled and shots were fired at the last revolution attempt. Nowadays its just traffic that is rolling by and busy. Putin has moved back to Kremlin, but the Whitehouse is still used by the rest of the government

Just across the White House on the other side of the Moskva is the Hotel Ukraina. This is a special shot. Usually the hotel is in illuminated with orange light, but these days its turned off. The extreme cold turned to an increased demand of energy, which the local powerplants can hardly supply and so the city has turned of some of the illuminations and even asked businesses to turn of their neon advertising lights .

Of course the White House remains illuminated.

The Moskva River in the opposite direction.

Vysotka Kudrinskaya from the back of the US-Embassy

After being out in the cold, we are going to have some coffee and warm ourselves up at Shokoladnitsa just across the main entrance of Zoo Park. Its our favorite Cafe in that area.

And finally I get my Irish Coffee. Its just the right thing on a cold winter day.

Ha, I couldn’t believe what I saw on Russian National (Rossija) TV last night. They showed a 30 minute documentary about English spies in Moscow. They showed their faces, how they operate, documents showing payments and so on. I guess some English spies will get their ass kicked this morning (or even last night already). FSB officials even said how they found out about the whole thing. Apparently they discovered that English embassy cars were seen frequently in some remote areas and nobody understood what they are doing there. Until FSB discovered a stone that actually was a wireless sender and receiver. The Russian contact walked by with a PDA like device and transmitted the data to the “stone”. Later on the Embassy guys came by and retrieved that information from that stone. Great toy. Almost like out of a James Bond movie.

I also like the treatment by the Russians. They arrested the Russian contact, but can’t get to the English spies from the embassy, since they have diplomatic status. So FSB just released the films they made and Russian TV made a story about it. It’s sort of a face slap for the English Secret Service and its agents.

Here is what the time writes about it this morning:

British diplomats in Russia were today embroiled in a Cold War-style intrigue following extraordinary claims that British agents used a fake rock to operate a street-level spying ring.

In a documentary broadcast on Rossiya state television last night, senior but anonymous Russian intelligence officials claimed that officials from the British embassy planted an imitation rock, packed with transmitting equipment, in a square on the outskirts of Moscow.

more here …
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006043,00.html

And German Spiegel Magazine has some nice photos (screenshots) of the stone.
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,PB64-SUQ9MTIyMzQmbnI9Mw_3_3,00.html