How does a new brand enter the CIS market?

The distributor is not turning you down. He is doing the arithmetic. Until his customers ask for your name, your brand is a cost to him. So we enter the region in a different order: presence first, so the people who buy from the distributor recognise the brand, and only then the email to the distributor.

Arindam Paul, a practitioner in India, puts it briefly: a distributor solves three things, supply, credit and placement on the shelf, and never influences how much leaves the shelf. He does not sell to the end customer.

In Central Asia the fight for the shelf is harder still. I will take Kazakhstan, because it has figures. INFOLine counted more than a hundred large food distributors in 2023, and more than 80% of them work in several channels at once: chains, traditional retail, HoReCa, wholesale. The chains take their share. In March 2026 food producers complained through Kapital.kz that retail chains charge retro bonuses and fees of up to 40% of the product price on top of a 15-20% markup. That is one side of a dispute, but it shows the mechanism: the shelf is paid for.

The distributor does not pay this out of his four percent. He passes it on to the manufacturer. A Russian trade journal for economists breaks down one distributor's quarterly marketing budget: 5.5 million roubles, of which 4 million is the manufacturers' money. One example and another country, but the ratio is typical: promotion in the channel is paid for by the brand.

This is what your email looks like from the distributor's desk. A name his customers have not mentioned. A product that needs warehouse space, credit terms and a sales rep's time. And not a word about who pays for the shelf. The question about the budget is an honest reply to an email like that.

A distributor has his own customer: a plant's purchasing officer, a shop, a restaurant, a construction company. That customer decides which brand he needs before he calls the distributor. Bain and Google surveyed 1,208 buyers in the USA: nine in ten had their list of suppliers before they started researching, and they then buy from that list. 6sense asked four thousand buyers in 2025 and got the same: 94% rank their suppliers in order of preference before the first conversation with a seller.

Your name is not on that list, and the distributor will not add it himself: there is nothing he can do with you except ask what money you intend to get onto the list with.

Rejection is not what to fear here. Ehrenberg-Bass and LinkedIn's B2B Institute surveyed six hundred or so buyers of business banking in the UK and of business insurance in the USA: about 10% actively reject a brand. Buyers who have never heard of the brand outnumber those who rejected it four to eight times over, and for smaller brands the gap is wider.

The usual way a manufacturer does it: an email to thirty or fifty distributors, a stand at a trade show, waiting. One exporter in Japan wrote about this on LinkedIn: he replaced the question "who will sell our product in Japan" with "how do we create demand before we scale". We answer the second question, only for Central Asia.

The email to the distributor goes out when there is something to show in it: how many people from his region saw the brand over those months, how many wrote in themselves, what they asked. The email is short, with one question. The pitch comes after the reply. The budget question will come up then too, but now there is an answer to it: the budget is already working, and the figures show what it brought.

It does not replace the distributor. Warehouse, credit terms and shelf stay with him, and you still have to negotiate them. It does not shrink the time to a contract to weeks: the 95-5 rule applies to you too, and most of your future buyers will buy after the campaign ends. If you sell plants, production lines or turnkey equipment, you usually do not need a distributor at all: there are dozens of buyers in a country, and we look for them directly. Presence in that case is built on the same channels, with fewer addressees, each known by name. And I have no statistics for the CIS on what share of distributors answer an unknown brand. There is only our own correspondence, and in it the budget question comes up more often than any other.

The same email, sent four months later, reads differently to the distributor. He types the name into search and finds a site in Russian, a page with followers from his own city, pieces about the product. His customers have already seen the name. At Artifact we do this work for the manufacturer: the first month costs $5,000, then 10-12 thousand a month.

Galina Sorokina