180 Amsterdam is based in a 400-year old canal house in Amsterdam. From this location, we work with brands from as far afield as Kobe, Japan, Colorado, Europe and the Middle East. And despite offering very different services, the one thing that unites every business we work with, is their ambition to be a global brand.
Middle East is home to a new wave of brands exploding onto the world stage. In recent years we’ve been lucky to work with brands such as Ooredoo and Qatar Airways who have a restless global ambition. The question for them is ‘How do we become a global brand for the long term?’
People’s inherent desire to belong requires brands to work harder on diving into culture, and providing a point of view that resonates. There are three key pillars to creating these cultural positionings.
The first is cultural empathy: taking a ‘We, not me’ approach. We call it ‘Walking in their shoes’. We worked with Qatar Airways to make sure that it’s much-hyped, and much criticized, partnership with FC Barcelona was credible and drove a clear global vision for the brand. By living with the FC Barcelona fan clubs, we were able to get a real understanding of the club’s global culture – information that could never have been gleaned from a questionnaire or focus group. That insight led to the ‘The Team that Unites the World’ campaign that won over this passionate audience and became the most successful piece of FCB content ever.
From empathy, the next step is commitment. A Havas study shows that majority of people wouldn’t care if 73 per cent of brands disappeared tomorrow. Only a small number of people feel that brands communicate honestly, and follow up on commitments. So, walk the talk. Our experience with Ooredoo is a good example. The brand’s launch in Kuwait was to be a big media event. However, its ‘promise’ of enriching people’s lives, especially working with local communities, women and entrepreneurs, would need to be more than just talk. That’s why the campaign was rooted in building the ‘I want’ programme that created life-changing experiences for those communities.
The third step is tension: every great story has it at its heart. This can come from breaking conventions, finding your enemy or creating a cultural shift. But a tension point is needed for your story to cut through.
If you get cultural tension right, you can create a cultural shift, fighting the category’s orthodoxies, the assumptions we make and, ultimately, change people’s perceptions.
It might be, as in the case of Ooredoo, championing local communities or women’s issues. Or, in the case of Qatar Airways, it might be in the role of the emerging markets that its impressive network supports. Importantly, it should be something that the brand’s business has a relevant role in and can have a credible point of view on.
As we look to those Middle Eastern brands with global ambitions, we need to keep asking ourselves, whether they are truly part of a global cultural conversation. Are they displaying the cultural empathy, commitment and tension needed to find a voice? A voice that not only lifts them out of the crowd but can establish a position that will sustain them in the hearts of customers for the long term.
This article was published in The Arabian Marketer February print issue.
To get your own copy, please email to marketing@arabianmarketer.ae
