“Market” will turn red
Yandex Market is starting to update its own brand on Wednesday, April 24, the trading platform told Forbes. Yandex will present a new visual style of the marketplace, a logo and an updated home page of its website. The dominant color of the Yandex Market brand will be red, Roman Maresov, head of the service and head of the Yandex e-com department, told Forbes. For example, the icon of the mobile application of the trading platform will be red with a yellow letter “M,” Forbes was convinced. Before the rebranding, the main color of the icon was yellow with a black “emka”.
The rebranding of Yandex Market will take place in several stages throughout this year. At the first stage, the service will update the interface on the website, in its mobile version and in the application. In April, the marketplace will change the design of some existing pick-up points (POIs) and will begin opening new POPOs in a new style.
Currently, the trading platform, according to data on its website for sellers, has 13,000 pickup points across the country. Of these, according to the end of the fourth quarter of 2023, 10,000 points were branded.
Updating the signs of existing Yandex Market order pick-up points (PVZ) will take place “at a calm pace throughout the year,” says Maresov. In total, up to 10,000 signs will need to be replaced, he added. “For existing locations, the sign and its delivery will be free, and the cost of dismantling the old sign and installing a new sign will be compensated by Market,” a representative of the trading platform told Forbes. According to her, the company will also pay for the change of uniform for the service’s couriers. She did not specify their number.
According to Roman Maresov, changing the Yandex Market brand will require repainting about 3,000 cars that deliver orders. The marketplace also plans to complete the update of trucks, pick-up points, logistics facilities and other offline brand carriers by the end of 2024, according to his message.
Maresov did not disclose the cost of rebranding. According to him, the brand renewal will take place at the expense of the annual marketing budget, which was approved by the Yandex board of directors. “The marketing budget for the service has not increased due to rebranding,” he said.
The current rebranding of Yandex Market is the first in three years. Prior to this, the marketplace’s corporate identity was updated in February 2021. Before this, in 2020, Yandex, following the division of assets with Sber, became the full owner of Yandex Market. That’s when the company introduced an icon with a “dynamic letter “M”.
The previous Yandex Market brand “has a problem” – it practically “visually did not exist for users,” argues Maresov. “Market’s cars and couriers in the corporate yellow color visually merge with the symbols of other Yandex services – Food and Taxi. For example, a taxi driver passes by with an advertisement for “Market” on his car, but a passer-by reads that it is “Taxi”. It’s the same with “Food”: when people see a “Food” or “Market” courier on the street, they do not always associate the branding of its form with the corresponding service,” he gives an example.
“It turns out that we are investing a lot of effort and money in offline media that help grow brand awareness. Forbes) “Taxi” and “Food”. For both services this figure is already close to 100%, but this does not help Market. Today there is no solution with the current identity, in particular, with the yellow color, thanks to which this problem can be solved. Therefore, we needed to update the color: Yandex historically has two colors – yellow and red. <..> We went through many options. If there is a Yandex color that is bright in an urban environment and at the same time understandable to the user, then you need to use it. Therefore, “Market” will turn red, and due to the large number of our offline media, this can significantly change the urban environment in visual terms,” explained Roman Maresov.
Rebranding of marketplaces
Yandex Market is not the only marketplace that has chosen red for its brand. The combination of red and yellow has also become a signature for the new brand of the Magnit Market marketplace, owned by the retailer Magnit. This marketplace was previously called KazanExpress. In 2023, according to Data Insight, it took 39th place in Russia in terms of online revenue, which reached 17.6 billion rubles. And his new brand “Magnit Market” was presented just last week. “Companies from different industries with similar corporate colors successfully coexist, maintaining their unique and easily recognizable brand,” a Yandex Market representative commented on the intersection of colors.
At the end of 2023, Yandex Market took third place in the TOP 100 Russian online stores compiled by Data Insight. Online sales of the platform reached 370.6 billion rubles. In second place in the ranking is Ozon (1.369 trillion rubles), in first place is Wildberries (2.143 trillion rubles). Fourth place in the ranking last year was occupied for the first time by Megamarket with online revenue of 312.7 billion rubles.
The Megamarket brand entered the market in 2023; previously the marketplace was called Sbermegamarket. Ozon introduced its new brand in 2019, adding crimson to the design and removing “.ru” from the name. In 2022, Ozon rebranded the Ozon Express service, changing its name to Ozon Fresh.
In April 2023, the owner of Wildberries, the richest woman in Russia, Tatyana Bakalchuk, spoke about the “smooth rebranding” of the marketplace. But in February of this year she did not confirm this plan. “The brand still needs to be updated. But there is no talk of updating the logo or rebranding,” said Bakalchuk (quoted by RIA Novosti).
What do analysts think?
According to current market practice, the design and outline of logos should be “updated” approximately every four years, Irina Bolotova, an expert at the service for organizing retail space “Pro.Story,” told Forbes. According to her, the red color that Yandex Market chose as a brand color is one of the brightest and most eye-catching colors, “usually indicating a low price.”
“The fact that competitors have similar colors is a fairly common story. Basically, a lot of logos have the color red, it’s not something unique, it will all depend on how they use it. I think that a brand like Yandex Market need not be afraid of intersections with other competitors, they will be able to pull it ahead, it will be very interesting to look at the result,” says Irina Bolotova.
Replacing signs and changing the uniforms of couriers during rebranding is usually done “very slowly and gradually,” notes Irina Bolotova. For example, the installation of new signs at 15,000 Pyaterochka stores as part of the renovation program took several years, she gives an example. A large-scale replacement of Yandex Market brand carriers could cost billions of rubles, but, most likely, the rebranding will be done in an “optimized way,” Bolotova expects.
“If we talk about rebranding, I would not pay special attention to specific color changes,” comments General Director of INFOline Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov. — It is quite logical that Market took the historical red color of Yandex, while maintaining its yellow in its identity. Against this background, it is more interesting that Yandex is now changing its strategy as a whole and is forming a comprehensive integration of all the company’s key businesses that operate in e-commerce. So, now there is a transformation taking place not only at Market, but also, for example, at Market Delivery (formerly Delivery Club. – Forbes), the application has become almost identical to Yandex Food. In his opinion, the Marketa brand at the pick-up point will be updated smoothly, because the pick-up points are partner ones. “As for dressing up couriers, it also seems to me that this process will be smooth. Therefore, serious one-time costs most likely relate to the development of visual solutions,” says the analyst.
