Marketers to the world - YAR Communications

Nation's Business, Feb, 1994 by Janet L. Willen

Yuri and Anna Radzievsky say they don't have to go far to find people to prepare marketing programs for clients around the world. In their New York City offices, Yufi says, you'll find people from "every major marketplace of the world and cultural marketplace of the United States."

Yuri is president and Anna is executive vice president of YAR Communications, Inc., which the husband-and-wife team owns. They call the company, whose name bears the couple's initials, "the voice of global business." Their firm has helped market goods and services in more than 100 countries as well as in ethnic communities in the United States.

When an American company marketed abroad in the past, Anna says, it used its English-language brochure or a translation, neither of which would be sufficient in a foreign marketplace. Instead, YAR tells companies that the language, color, and design of marketing pieces--whether print, film, or video--should be tailored to the country. "It matters which way you close your kimono... and what color you wear for mourning," Anna says.

When the couple emigrated from the Soviet Union about 20 years ago, they spoke little English. They registered in an English-language class but decided they could learn faster by watching movies. In their first venture to the cinema, they mistook the X rating and walked into the erotic feature "The Devil in Miss Jones." Yuri says that illustrates how the "amount of knowledge needed to communicate with different cultures is vast compared to what one can get from a language course."

In 1975, Yuri and Anna formulated their idea for Euramerica, their first company. At that point, Yuri was marketing linguistic services and supervising the Russian department at a translation company where Anna free-lanced in the evenings. During the day, Anna was a researcher at a perfume company. Says Yuri: "We developed a concept of building a company that goes beyond translation .. that specializes in communicating with different cultures."

The Radzievskys were unlikely entrepreneurs. They were both educated as engineers but had no training in business. They had saved only $2,000.

From its inception, Euramerica depended on people who had firsthand knowledge of a country's culture and language to prepare material. The Radzievskys' first marketing proposal was for a technical publication in French for Mack Truck. Yuri says they won the job because they commissioned French engineers as technical writers, while their competitors proposed using American foreign-language students.

In its early years, Euramerica adapted existing marketing campaigns to fit the foreign market. In 1981 the company began creating campaigns as well when it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency; the couple continued to run the business. After Ogilvy & Mather changed hands in 1990, the Radzievskys tried to buy Euramerica back, but they were outbid. They then began YAR Communications.

The couple won't disclose annual sales, but YAR now has 70 employees and 2,000 free-lancers with expertise in various languages and cultures. Most of YAR's clients are U.S. corporations looking to sell abroad. For example, YAR is helping AT&T promote a line of business telephone systems in Russia.

The domestic ethnic marketplace is an area of potential growth for the company. "U.S. companies are accepting the fact that there are millions of consumers that speak languages other than English or Spanish," Yuri says.

"This nonmass market," he says, "is larger than many European countries." And he says he and his wife know "what makes this market tick."