Growing a luxury brand: Advice from Russia

The power of niche

Duma began with an important point, and one which has come up again and again over the course of this first day of DIS 2016: the importance of niche. As she explained, niches are powerful, important and here to stay – and building on this, finding a committed and passionate base, is the way forward for publishers.

Miroslava Duma DIS 2016 ()

Telling the story of the company’s beginnings in Russia, Duma explained that as a millennial and an avid user of social media, she didn’t want to wait for content – she wanted something with immediate accessibility, 24 hours a day. This was one of the founding principles of Buro.

Initially, she explained, it was hard to convince luxury brands to pay attention because Buro didn’t have a background in print – many worried about a purely digital brand. This sounds laughable now: everyone’s doing it! Yet it was important to Buro to secure support from these global brands, to make sure the stories Buro tells are ones that can travel, and that people want to share. With tailored content on each of its sites in different countries, social media-specific microcontent is a very important part of the strategy.

Buro’s rapid growth has meant having to adapt – fast. As Duma explained, there are ambitious plans to expand into priority markets like Japan, India, USA, Germany, China and more. In addition, they plan to extend B2B offerings and enhance creative agency solutions, eg. bespoke video production, which is becoming increasingly in demand.

‘Being global means being local’

While the brand obviously has exciting and ambitious plans for expansion, ultimately the content needs to be relevant for readers in their country or local area.

And so, commenting on the way Buro pushes its international advertisers to “think local”, Duma ended with a key message which has resonated throughout the first day of talks at DIS 2016: that for Buro, being global means being local. 

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