New “European” car brand for Russia turned out to be a rebranding of BelGee
By ForGeeks The promised launch of a new car brand with a European character turned out to be a banal marketing trick: the loud announcement hid the already known BelGee crossovers.
Last week, a mysterious countdown to the launch of a “new European brand for the Russian market” appeared on the website heartofeurope.ru heartofeurope.ru. Although there were no official details at the time, the domain was registered to the Belarusian-Chinese joint venture BelJi, which caused a wave of speculation: allegedly the manufacturer is preparing a new sub-brand under which it plans to promote modern Geely models.
The planned intrigue turned out to be a banal substitution
On April 14, the site finally went live – and expectations were not met. Instead of a new brand, users saw a catalog of already known models:
- BelGee X50 (Geely Coolray variant),
- BelGee X70 (Geely Atlas Pro analog).
The two models have long been sold on the Russian market and are not new either in design or technology. Thus, the announcement turned out to be just a change of the shell: no new brand appeared, and already existing cars received only a symbolic “rethinking”.
“The heart of Europe” turned out to be in Belarus
To reinforce the slogan of the campaign – “From the Heart of Europe”, the manufacturer referred to the research of Belarusian scientists Alexei Solomonov and Valery Anoshko, according to which the geographical center of Europe is located in Belarus. These data, as it is specified, were published back in 2000 in the scientific journal of the Moscow University of Geodesy and Cartography.
Even with this “scientific” argumentation, however, the meaning of the marketing campaign remains unclear: in the eyes of consumers, the promise of a “new European brand” looked like preparation for the launch of a fresh product – not the repackaging of old models under a new slogan.
