'The price of a product should depend on the quality of the strong drink rather than on the type of bottle and packaging used. Khortytsa sees its products’ outstanding quality as the company’s utmost priority, so the statistical data we have are hardly surprising: anyone who’s tried our drink at least once will stay loyal to the brand forever. We are already supplying alcohol to seventy-seven different countries, which means we’ve managed to win our customers over as well as convince them that our vodka is a great quality product,’ Khortytsa’s Marketing Director Sergey Velichko says.

In the meantime, AC Nielsen reports the down-market segment is becoming less and less popular with the buyers of vodka, who have grown choosier and go for better quality products whose retail price does not merely exceed its prime cost. In fact, cheap vodka used to make up 90% of strong drinks sales in 2000, whereas only 40% of the market sales come from this drink category today.

Up-market strong drinks producers like to speak of their products as being ’premium quality’ ones, yet experts feel a product’s belonging to the premium class is dependent upon the image-promotion factors like packaging and brand status rather than the actual quality of the contents. As for customers, they are usually looking for something known as value for the money. This could be one of the reasons Khortytsa has come to be so popular lately: the world’s No.3 strong drink producer (preceded by Absolut and Smirnoff) offers nice quality vodka without making a customer pay extra for the fancy bottling and packaging, their press officer says.