Stoli Vodka: How to Save a Brand from the Middle of The Ukraine Crisis and Turn the Table Around

Qian Jiang
Marketing in the Age of Digital
3 min readMar 27, 2022

As the Ukraine crisis continues influencing the whole world, more brands speak out to support Ukraine. For Vodka brands particularly, many of them originate from Russia or have a Russian-sounding name. These brands face a critical point that they must take action to prevent their business from being boycotted. News and internet comments both reveal that “Russian” liquors have been removed from multiple liquor stores.

Stoli, originally Stolichnaya, announced their rebrand on Mar. 4th, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The brand ended the use of Stolichnaya, and will be exclusively marketed and sold as Stoli. A related statement on the official website claims that they have a long history of fighting the Russian Regime. And a quote from their founder, “as a Royal Marine Commando, this is also personal to us”, as Shelfer personally has been exiled by Russia.

Is it true that Stoli has been fighting against the Russian regime? Or it’s just a narrative to appeal to the audience under the current situation. Let’s find out.

Long-Standing Conflict with Russia Has Been Brought Up

Stoli is a historical brand that can track back to Soviet time. After the brand was acquired by a private company called SPI Group, Russia ban the legality of the sale of Stolichnaya and vested the rights to a state-sponsored company, FKP Sojuzplodoimport. For the U.S., Stoli is operated by Stoli Group, a division of SPI Group.

One known conflict is that Stoli Group founder Yuri Shefler was exiled for his oppression of the regime. The other is that Stoli made a public statement to oppose Russia’s anti-gay laws while the public initiates a “dumping Russia liquors” activity. Both times Stoli has stood on the opposite side of Russia.

All Channels Works Together to Deliver a Consistent Message

While announcing the rebrand, Stoli also did the following actions regarding the Ukraine crisis.

Website: When landing on Stoli's official website, the very first thing you see is the statement of “Stoli Group Denouncing Russian Aggression”.

Organic Search Results: More surprisingly, when I researched the Stoli brand on Google, first-page search results are all talking about their rebrand and their anti-Russia standpoints. The organic search results aid Stoli to gain public support while we do research on the brand.

Social media: they recently posted 9 images putting together a whole image of a pigeon with Ukraine blue and yellow color. This is more powerful and visually appealed than one post. In addition, the social media manager has been very engaged with the audience. Under every comment that criticized or badmouth about they being a Russian brand, the social media manager will post a long paragraph to explain that they were not a Russian brand and made in Latvia, and they support peace and Ukraine people.

There is more than the statement and social media posts about solidarity. The recent two Instagram posts are about their collaboration with World Central Kitchen, which is an NPO that helps Ukrainian with food.

The consistency of all channels communicates to the public that Stoli is trying hard to distance them from Russia and make it clear about what they stand for.

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Qian Jiang
Marketing in the Age of Digital

Digital Marketer, Media Ethics, Grad stu @NYU Integrated Marketing