Fieldwork in Moscow. Over the 15 years of Thinktank’s history the city has been transformed and, on the face of it, looks a lot like Western European capital cities. International brands dominate the centre so you can buy pretty much what you buy pretty much elsewhere.
However, international brands play a rather minor role in the huge and growing app-supported services sector. Instead Russian consumers, as well as foreign researchers, are extremely likely to use the king of Russian service brands, Yandex.
But what is Yandex exactly? Can you call Yandex Russia’s Google, or maybe Russia’s Uber? Well, Yandex, or Яндекс, is Google, Uber and various other services rolled into one.
While Uber does prowl the Russian capital, the streets really belong to Yandex.Taxi. That seems fitting. The car-hailing firm’s app branding is predominantly bright yellow, with a touch of black, so it’s hard not to think of New York’s cabs. As a foreigner in a city where the street signs are written only in Cyrillic having something familiar can be comforting when you’re trying to find your way around. Here Yandex.Taxi can certainly be a friend about town.
When you’re on foot, there’s the Yandex.Maps app, which has a cleaner look than Google Maps. It’s way better than that curious wayfinder Apple Maps, which appears to believe that when you are standing bang in front of the Kremlin, what you really, really want are the locations of all the Italian restaurants in the vicinity. Though to be fair there are a lot of Italian restaurants in this city (tip: Yandex.Search is the place to go if you’re looking for a plate of pasta).
Yandex does more than simply find you a place to dine, though. It brings food to your door via Yandax.Eats, which is the local equivalent of Deliveroo. Should you be hankering for a spot of entertainment you could turn to Yandex.Video for Russia’s answer to YouTube, or to Yandex.Music for audio streaming à la Spotify. Yandex.Money is a payment service, Yandex.Disk is there to serve your cloud storage needs, while Yandex.Afisha will help you get theatre tickets (I worked that out using, of course, Yandex.Translate).In fact, Yandex has it fingers in more than 70 businesses, which really does make it a useful companion to Moscow for a researcher on fieldwork moonlighting as photo reporter to add that local colour to the debrief. And clearly all of this is handy for consumers, with the one-stop-shop aspect making city life almost effortless, and Yandex branding a strong signifier.
And there’s no pushback from consumers on this concentration of digital power – we certainly didn’t pick up any sensitivity to the Yandex monopoly.
On the surface, this seems very different indeed to the West. But is that really the case? Western consumers remain curiously unconcerned about the stockpiling and use of their data by tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook. Look closely and it’s actually civil liberties advocacy groups and regulators making the noise while individuals stay busy posting on social media.
And, hold on, in Russia the news is that Yandex is being restructured to give the government more say over the company via a ‘golden share’ (though surely that should be yellow). That’s because the authorities say they’re worried about Yandex’s huge amount of data falling into the wrong hands … and that means foreign ownership. The Kremlin has, understandably, no tolerance for Western brands dominating the digital space even if they lord it over Moscow’s city streets.
Steve Mullins is a researcher, writer and designer at Thinktank International Research