Hidden Power: Content Marketing as a part of global business strategies of Westen companies in the Russian environment

Abstract: International companies face many challenges when operating in foreign country markets, as a new environment could be absolutely opposite to the one of the home market, which the companies are used to. One of the biggest issues for a company in the foreign market is to understand how to market its product and make it more appealing to the audience. This research is aimed at studying content marketing strategy as a new trend and a part of marketing strategy of an organization. Particularly, the main focus of this research is to investigate the process of building content marketing strategy of Western firms in the Russian environment. During the study, a few questions are illuminated, such as what steps are undertaken in order to manage a sound content marketing strategy and how the characteristics of Russian consumers influence the decision making and to what extent. The paper studies all these issues by the qualitative approach, presenting data and insights acquired through interviews with four Western companies, operating in Russia: Burger King, Johnson & Johnson, The Coca-Cola Company and Visa Inc. The analysis of the findings is done, comparing the experience of the companies with each other, which enables the authors to extract general patterns for content marketing strategy in Russia in terms of strategy building and consumer orientation and comparing empirical data with theoretical knowledge gained after the examination of the theory. The paper concludes giving answers to the research question and generalizing the analysis, as well as presenting the revised conceptual model. Later on, the main limitations of this study are mentioned and the suggestions for future research are stated to develop the understanding of content marketing strategy.