‘Neither of the two car dealers is going to win anything as a result of the current public relations warfare. One of them might be able to entice a number of customers through blackening its rival at first, but in the long run, people are going to shun both companies,’ Director of Saint Petersburg-based BC Communications Olga Chernyshova said to UrBC. She believes the continuation of this mutual negative publicity campaign will affect the sales of both car centers badly.

‘The customers will simply get confused and are bound to stop trusting both companies. This means they will start buying cars in other Russian cities; besides, if a new large player arrives on Yekaterinburg premium class car market, all the potential buyers will choose the new dealer,’ Ms Chernyshova says.

According to Ms Chernyshova, the information war Krasnolesie Car Center and Autoland Holding are waging against one another damages the reputation of the brands they are selling and undermines their entire performance.

‘If this clash acquires federal or international rather than just local scale and if the suppliers that provide these dealers with cars actually find out, both car centers might lose their licenses,’ she maintains.

A website www.rfblog.ru is regularly updated with some blackening news about Krasnolesie car center. The articles posted there are critical of the quality of the company’s service and predict its upcoming bankruptcy. In addition, they focus on alleged cases of treating the customers badly and alleged instances of unfair competition. The authors of the blog claim that it was actually created as a way of ‘publicly reacting to Krasnolesie’s unscrupulous business practices.’ Moreover, the materials featured there prove that the creation of this blog was brought about by an alleged negative publicity campaign targeted at Autoland Holding.

Both companies compete in terms of selling Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo cars