Baltika cigarettes ?€” which, just like the beer, come in flavors such as Baltika No. 3 and Baltika No. 9 ?€” were being distributed in downtown St. Petersburg this week as part of a marketing push to introduce the new brand.
At about 10 rubles a pack, they were selling briskly ?€” and those who bought a carton were rewarded with a free bottle of ?€¦ Baltika beer.
The brewery, not surprisingly, is displeased.
Lyudmila Fomichyova, press secretary of Baltika Brewery, said her company intends "to protect its trademark," possibly by going to court.
"All of our trademarks are registered, and using them without our permission is illegal," she said.
But the makers of the cigarettes ?€” which are churned out at Metatabak, a factory based in the Moscow region town of Podolsk ?€” say otherwise.
"The people from St. Petersburg [i.e., Baltika beer] still have to prove that they have exclusive rights to the word ?€?Baltika,?€™" said Grigory Izraelyan, commercial director of Soyuzkontrakt-Tabak, which owns the Podolsk factory. "I have consulted lawyers, and they [the brewery] do not own this trademark."
Izraelyan said that a "small regional firm called BTF" had placed the production order for the Baltika cigarettes. Izraelyan said the first consignment ?€” 300 crate-loads, or about 120,000 packs ?€” was fulfilled late last week. He said the design on the cartons was put forward by the customers.
"We hope that we will continue working with BTF," Izraelyan said, and for that reason, he said, he was declining to put journalists in touch with BTF ?€” for fear that it might jeopardize future Baltika cigarette orders.
Alexei Skvortsov, a lawyer who specializes in protecting trademarks, said he thought Izraelyan and his business partners had little chance of surviving a court case ?€” particularly because not just the name but the entire Baltika beer logo is used on the cigarettes.
"A court is unlikely to support those who profit by using the reputation of others," he said.
According to the Gallup AdFact Agency, between January and August Baltika spent more than $2 million on television advertising alone.
Advertising cigarettes on television, however, is illegal, and launching a new cigarette brand is often an expensive marketing task.
If there was a beer worth attaching one?€™s fortunes to, it would probably be Baltika: Research by the COMCON marketing agency found it to be the nation?€™s most popular beer.
Fifty percent of the nation?€™s beer drinkers drink Baltika, COMCON found, and 73 percent recognize the name, which is almost 10 percent better then the far older Zhigulyovskoye beer.
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