Fitch Unveils Centro: New Brand for Russian Leading Shoe Retailer

CENTRO is a Russian market leading low-cost shoe retailer targeted at a mainstream audience.

The company owns 315 stores around Russia and its main format is a discount store of 250-400 sq. m. 80% of the assortment is produced by the company under its own brand CENTRO.

Fitch was appointed in May 2008 to carry out a rebranding project for CentrObuv Group of Companies, creating an international brand that would be perceived differently by its target audiences.

The key business objective of the project was to help the company become a leader in the low-cost shoe retail sector in Russia.

The new target audience for the company was identified as students and young professionals (mostly women) under 30.

During the initial stage of the project Fitch completed a full audit of existing brand positioning and held a series of interviews and seminars with key stakeholders.

Fitch also carried out competitor audit and undertook trends analysis in the international shoe retailing sector.

The audit results demonstrated that the CentrObuv brand had great potential due to a high level of brand awareness, a large and affordable range of products and highly trained staff.

However, in order to attract a new target audience it was essential to add emotional appeal to brand communications, enlarging current positioning based on the principle "pay less".

The idea was to show that CentrObuv is not just about low prices for shoes and accessories - it is also about affordable style; which would become an essential emotional part of brand communications.