Majed Altir

Brand & Culture/March 2026

Saudi Luxury Runs on Culture, Not Campaigns

Walk into almost any global luxury brand's regional strategy meeting and you will find a version of the same document. Market size projections. Demographic data. A flagship location in a premium mall. A campaign adapted from Paris or Milan with local touches applied at the edges.

The logic is familiar. The brand is established. The consumer has spending power. The formula has worked everywhere else.

What that document rarely contains is an honest account of what the Saudi luxury consumer is actually buying. Not the product. The experience of being received.

And that is a different thing entirely.

The Saudi luxury market does not reward the most prestigious brand. It rewards the brand that understands where it has arrived.

The Formula Is Right. The Market Has Moved.

For most of the past century, global luxury operated on a consistent logic. Heritage justified price. Scarcity created desire. The object itself, the watch, the handbag, the couture piece, was both the product and the message. Owning it was the statement.

That model was designed around a specific consumer: an individual making a personal choice that reflected private taste and social positioning. It worked because the unit of consumption was the individual.

In Saudi Arabia, the unit of consumption is frequently not the individual. It is the group.

This is not a cultural footnote. It is a structural reality that changes almost everything about how a luxury experience needs to be designed.

The restaurant that seats eight for a private dinner is not an edge case. The hospitality suite that accommodates an extended family gathering is not a special request. The experience that unfolds across multiple generations, with different expectations present at the same table, is the norm. Brands that design for the individual consumer and accommodate the group will always feel slightly misaligned. Brands that design for the group and honour the individual within it are the ones that generate genuine loyalty.

Hospitality Here Is Not a Service Standard. It Is a Social Contract.

There is a concept embedded in Arab hospitality culture that does not translate cleanly into a service training manual. It is the idea that generosity toward a guest is not a courtesy. It is an obligation, one that carries meaning far beyond the transaction.

When a Saudi guest enters a luxury environment, they are not simply evaluating the product or assessing the service efficiency. They are reading whether the space understands this contract. Whether the people in it have been trained to perform warmth or have been shaped to genuinely express it.

The difference is not subtle. It is immediately felt.

There are international luxury brands in Saudi Arabia that score exceptionally well on every global service metric, speed, accuracy, presentation, brand consistency, and still fail to generate the emotional connection that drives return visits and social recommendation. The mechanics were visible. The meaning was absent.

What those brands missed is that in this market, a slightly slower interaction that feels genuinely attentive will always outperform a technically flawless one that feels procedural. Efficiency is a baseline expectation. Sincerity is the differentiator.

No campaign recovers what a cold interaction loses.

You can spend a significant budget building awareness. You cannot spend your way out of feeling foreign.

AlUla Did Not Succeed Because of Its Amenities.

Working on destination positioning within Saudi Arabia brings a particular kind of clarity. You see quickly which messages land and which ones disappear into the noise. You learn that the same information, framed differently, produces entirely different responses.

AlUla is perhaps the clearest illustration of this. The destination has extraordinary infrastructure, world-class hospitality, dramatic architecture, logistics that required years of investment to build. None of that is what makes it compelling.

What makes AlUla work is that it does not ask the visitor to come and be impressed. It asks them to come and be somewhere. The landscape, the heritage, the narrative built around Hegra and the ancient civilisations that shaped this place, together they create the sense that arriving here means entering something rare. Not a product. A story.

That distinction matters strategically. Because it reveals something about how the Saudi luxury consumer is beginning to evaluate experience. The question is no longer only 'Is this prestigious?' It is increasingly 'Does this mean something? Does it connect me to something real?'

Brands entering this market with prestige as their primary currency are competing on a dimension the market is already moving past.

Three Assumptions That Consistently Mislead Global Brands

The most common mistake is not ignorance. It is assumption, the belief that what has worked in comparable markets will translate here with minor adaptation.

The first assumption is that religious observance operates as a constraint on luxury consumption. It does not. Ramadan, for example, is not a period of reduced market activity. It is a period of transformed social architecture. Iftar gatherings, late-night celebrations, and the particular rhythm of generosity that defines the month create moments of luxury consumption that have no equivalent in any other season. Brands that adapt to this rhythm, that design experiences and communications specifically for it, earn a loyalty that lasts beyond the month. Brands that pause or maintain their standard calendar simply become invisible.

The second assumption is that generational difference can be managed with a segmented campaign. The reality is more complex. Saudi Arabia contains, often within the same household, consumers shaped by traditional values and consumers shaped by entirely global digital culture. These are not separate audiences to be addressed separately. They are present in the same room, influencing each other's decisions, and evaluating a brand's cultural intelligence simultaneously. A brand that speaks convincingly to one and clumsily to the other fails both.

The third assumption is that premium positioning signals cultural alignment. It does not. Prestige is recognised. But prestige without cultural understanding reads, in the Saudi context, as distance. And distance is the opposite of what luxury is supposed to deliver here.

Adapting to this market does not mean changing the brand. It means understanding the environment in which the brand is being received.

Cultural Intelligence Is a Business Capability, Not a Sensitivity Exercise.

Cultural intelligence in the Saudi luxury context is not about avoiding missteps. It is about building the internal capability to design experiences that feel genuinely at home in this market, not merely technically present.

In practice, this means designing service protocols that reflect Arab hospitality values rather than simply translating international standards. It means building spatial experiences that accommodate the social consumer, not just the individual one. It means understanding which communication approaches signal respect and which, despite being globally polished, signal that the brand has not done the work.

It also means accepting a counterintuitive truth: the brands that perform best in Saudi Arabia are not always the most famous ones. They are the ones that listened before they spoke. That understood before they positioned. That arrived as learners rather than authorities.

The market rewards this. Not because Saudi consumers are different from luxury consumers elsewhere. But because they are sophisticated enough to know the difference between a brand that is present and a brand that belongs.

A New Definition of Luxury Is Being Written Here.

Saudi Arabia is not simply a new geography for existing luxury models. It is one of the few places in the world where the definition of luxury itself is being actively renegotiated.

Experience over ownership. Collective over individual. Cultural depth over visual prestige. Emotional sincerity over procedural perfection.

These are not departures from luxury. They are its evolution. And they are being shaped not by global brand strategy, but by the cultural intelligence of the brands willing to understand the consumer they are actually serving.

The Saudi luxury market is not waiting to be educated by international brands. It is building the environment in which those brands will either earn their place, or remain, as many already do, politely visible and genuinely irrelevant.

The difference between those two outcomes is not the campaign. It is the understanding behind it.

About the author

Majed Altir is a strategic marketing and communications leader with over fifteen years of experience across Saudi Arabia and the GCC. His work spans banking, media, technology, government, destination marketing, culture, entertainment, and sports, leading complex, large-scale campaigns and initiatives that have reached consumers, investors, industry leaders, organisations, and decision-makers across global markets. A recipient of 8 Communication and Campaign Awards earned across multiple teams and sectors, he writes the Cross-Sector Thinking series, perspectives on marketing, communications, strategy, branding, and change for leaders who would rather shape markets than follow them. majedaltir.com

Marketing/March 2026

You Are Not Running Ads. You Are Building Demand.

There is a distinction that most marketing conversations quietly sidestep: the difference between placing an ad in front of an audience and actually building demand. The first is a transaction. The second is a relationship. Google understands this difference well, and the current wave of updates to its Demand Gen platform is the clearest signal yet that the industry is being pushed, deliberately, in that direction.

The updates announced this week are not incremental feature additions to an existing system. They represent a coherent repositioning of what paid media is supposed to accomplish. And for marketers in the GCC who are navigating growing budgets, fragmented attention, and increasing pressure to prove value beyond clicks and conversions, the implications are worth reading carefully.

The Metric We Were Missing

For years, the upper funnel suffered from an accountability problem. Brand awareness campaigns were approved on faith and evaluated on vanity metrics. Reach and impressions told you how many people saw something. They told you nothing about whether it changed anything. That credibility gap has cost the upper funnel its fair share of budget in every review cycle.

The Attributed Branded Searches feature now available in Demand Gen changes that. It shows the volume of branded search queries on Google and YouTube that a campaign directly generates. A user sees your video on YouTube, does not click, continues their day, and searches for your brand three days later. In a last-click attribution model, that conversion is credited to search. But now, for the first time, there is a number that traces the causal thread back to the Demand Gen exposure that created the intent.

That number is not a nice-to-have. For anyone who has tried to justify awareness investment to a CFO or a regional leadership team, it is the evidence that changes the conversation. It turns a philosophical argument about brand building into a measurable business case. And in markets where short-term performance metrics have dominated media planning, that shift matters enormously.

Awareness was never the problem. The problem was that we could not prove it. Now we can.

Authenticity Is Not a Creative Choice. It Is a Performance Variable.

The integration of YouTube creator content into Demand Gen campaigns is showing a 30 percent average increase in conversion lift on YouTube Shorts compared to standard brand-produced creative. That figure deserves more than a passing mention in a product announcement. It is telling us something fundamental about how audiences are processing commercial content in 2026.

The consumer has become remarkably skilled at distinguishing between a brand speaking and a person speaking. The former triggers a familiar kind of selective attention, we hear the message but do not fully receive it. The latter operates on different cognitive terms. When a creator speaks about a product in their own voice, in the context of their own relationship with an audience, the recommendation lands differently. It carries social trust that no production budget can replicate.

The announcement that Google is building creator discovery and collaboration tools directly into the Google Ads interface is significant not because the technology is novel, but because it removes the friction that kept creator partnerships out of most performance media plans. The practical barrier was always workflow, not intent. That barrier is now lower. The question that remains, and it is a harder question, is how brands in this region build creator relationships that preserve the authenticity that makes the 30 percent real. A creator who becomes too visibly a media placement loses the very quality that made them valuable.

The 30 percent uplift does not belong to the creator format. It belongs to earned trust. Lose the trust and you lose the number.

The Living Room Screen Is Back, and It Is Shoppable

Connected television has been discussed as a frontier for digital advertising for several years without ever quite delivering the conversion infrastructure to match its reach. The Shoppable CTV capability in Demand Gen changes that equation. Campaigns that include TV screen placements are showing an average of 7 percent additional conversions at the same return on investment. The number is modest, but the structural argument is not.

Connected television is the only screen where attention is still relatively whole. Mobile is fragmented across dozens of competing inputs. Desktop is inherently multi-tasked. The living room, at the end of an evening, is the closest thing to undivided attention that advertising can access in a digital context. The challenge has always been converting that attention into action without disrupting the experience enough to generate rejection. The shoppable format, embedded naturally into the viewing moment, appears to have found a version of that balance, at least in the current data.

For brands in retail, hospitality, and entertainment, categories with strong presence in Saudi and GCC consumer spending, this is a placement worth serious testing rather than a theoretical exercise. The question is not whether CTV should be in the plan. It is whether the creative is built for a lean-back screen rather than a lean-forward one. Those are different briefs.

AI-Generated Creative: The Tool Is Not the Strategy

The inclusion of Veo 3.1, Google's AI video generation tool, in the Demand Gen creative workflow addresses a real operational problem. Producing video in multiple formats, resolutions, and aspect ratios for different placements is expensive and slow. The ability to generate variants from existing image assets, or to produce entirely new video content for campaign needs, reduces a significant production bottleneck.

The practical value for regional markets is particularly clear. Campaigns often require localisation across multiple markets, rapid adaptation to platform requirements, and creative refresh at a pace that traditional production cannot sustain. AI-generated creative solves part of that problem with genuine efficiency.

But the efficiency argument should not be mistaken for a creative argument. What AI removes is the friction of production. What it does not provide is the judgment about what should be produced. The absence of production friction historically created a useful filter, only the ideas worth the investment made it to air. When that filter disappears, it has to be replaced by something else: sharper editorial standards, clearer creative briefs, and a more deliberate process for deciding which ideas deserve to exist. The tool scales execution. The strategy still has to come from somewhere.

AI removes the friction of production. It does not replace the judgment about what deserves to be made.

What the Data Is Actually Telling Us

Taken together, the updates to Demand Gen in early 2026 reflect a consistent thesis: that the future of paid media is not about reaching more people more efficiently, but about building genuine relationships between brands and audiences before the purchase decision forms. Creator partnerships that carry social trust. Measurement that traces intent signals rather than just capturing existing demand. Placement on screens where attention is still real. These are not isolated features. They are a coherent direction.

For marketers managing budgets and strategies in this region, the discipline that follows is a harder one than tool adoption. It requires holding a different measurement framework for campaigns designed to build demand versus campaigns designed to capture it. It requires defending the upper funnel investment in leadership conversations using the new metrics available, rather than defaulting to last-click attribution as the only acceptable evidence. And it requires building creator relationships that are genuine enough to actually earn the trust that makes the performance data possible.

The platform is ready. The harder question, as always, is whether the thinking behind the campaigns is ready to match it.

Demand Gen is ready for the next stage of media strategy. The more important question is whether your strategy is ready for it.

About the author

Strategy/March 2026

The Brief Is the Strategy. Most Briefs Are Not.

There is a moment in almost every campaign that people misidentify as the beginning.

The agency presents the creative concept. The room reacts. The energy is either right or it is not. And if it is not, the conversation turns to what needs to change. The idea. The execution. The budget. The timeline.

What almost nobody questions is what came before the concept. Nobody asks about the document that directed everything the agency built. The brief was approved weeks ago. It went through the right channels. It has the right signatures. It is, by all administrative measures, done.

But briefs are not administrative documents. They are strategic ones. And a brief that was approved is not necessarily a brief that was right.

Most campaigns do not fail in execution. They fail in the document that made the execution inevitable.

How the Brief Became a Formality

The creative brief was not always a checkbox. In its original form, it was an act of strategic discipline, a forcing function that required an organisation to answer, clearly and honestly, questions it might otherwise avoid.

Who exactly are we talking to? What do we need them to think, feel, or do differently? What is the one thing this communication must achieve? And what does the organisation know, genuinely know, about the person on the receiving end?

Those questions are harder than they appear. They require decisions. They require choosing one audience over another, one objective over a list of objectives, one truth over a set of aspirations. They require the kind of internal clarity that most organisations find uncomfortable to reach.

So over time, the brief accommodated that discomfort. Audiences became broader. Objectives multiplied. The single-minded proposition became a paragraph. Approvals were added. Layers of sign-off transformed a strategic document into a political one, designed to satisfy stakeholders rather than to direct creative work.

What remains is a document that looks like a brief. That has all the sections a brief should have. That was reviewed and approved by the right people. And that gives the agency almost nothing useful to work with.

When a brief tries to say everything, it directs nothing. The creative team fills the vacuum with their best guess, not your strategy.

The Questions a Brief Is Actually Answering

A brief is not a description of what you want the campaign to do. It is a record of how clearly you understand the problem you are trying to solve.

That distinction matters because most briefs are written from the inside out. They start with what the organisation wants to say: the messages it wants to land, the attributes it wants to be associated with, the announcement it wants to make. Then they describe an audience in broad enough terms to justify saying it to everyone.

The better briefs work in the opposite direction. They start with the person being addressed. What that person currently believes. What would need to change for them to act differently. What this communication realistically has the power to shift. Then they define what the organisation needs to say, in that specific context, to that specific person, at that specific moment.

The difference in output is not subtle. One approach produces campaigns that are coherent from the organisation's perspective. The other produces campaigns that are relevant from the audience's perspective.

They are not the same thing. And in a market where attention is finite and alternatives are always one decision away, only one of them works.

The audience does not read your brief. They experience its consequences. If the thinking was shallow, the work will be. And they will know before you do.

Three Signals That the Brief Has Already Failed

The first is when the brief contains more than one objective stated as a priority. A campaign cannot simultaneously build awareness, drive conversion, shift perception, and support a sales target. Each of those goals requires a different strategy, a different creative approach, a different measure of success. When a brief lists all of them, it is not ambitious. It is undecided. And undecided briefs produce work that tries to do everything and lands as nothing.

The second is when the audience definition is a demographic, not a person. Age range, income bracket, geographic market: these are segmentation inputs, not strategic insights. The question a brief needs to answer is not who this person is statistically. It is what they are thinking and feeling at the moment this communication reaches them. What they already know. What they are sceptical about. What would genuinely change their mind. Without that, the creative team is producing work for a profile rather than a human being.

The third is when the single-minded proposition is negotiated rather than discovered. The proposition is the heart of the brief: the one thing the communication must make real for the audience. When it is written by committee, softened to accommodate multiple stakeholders, or expanded to include qualifications and caveats, it stops being a proposition. It becomes a compromise. And compromises do not inspire work that cuts through.

A brief that was negotiated into existence has already surrendered the most important thing it was supposed to protect: a clear point of view.

The Internal Conversation Nobody Is Having

The brief problem is not a creative problem. It is a leadership problem.

Because the brief reflects the quality of the strategic thinking that preceded it. If the positioning is unclear, the brief will be unclear. If the organisation has not made real decisions about its audience, the brief will hedge. If leadership is not aligned on what this campaign needs to achieve, the brief will carry all of that misalignment, packaged neatly into a format that makes it look resolved.

The agency will then do what agencies do: make creative sense of what they have been given. They will produce something. It will be reviewed. Feedback will focus on the execution, the tone, the visuals, the messaging hierarchy. And the underlying problem, the one that existed in the brief before the agency ever saw it, will remain invisible.

Until the campaign runs and produces results that do not match expectations. At which point the debrief will examine the creative, the media plan, the market conditions. The brief will not come up. It never does.

This is where the cycle locks itself. The problem that caused the failure is the same problem that the debrief will not find, because nobody thought to look for it before the concept was presented.

The organisations that consistently produce work that matters treat the brief as the hardest part of the process, not the administrative part.

What a Brief That Actually Works Looks Like

It is shorter than most organisations are comfortable with. Not because brevity is a virtue in itself, but because brevity is the result of having made real decisions. Every unnecessary sentence in a brief is evidence of a choice that was not made.

It contains a single audience description written as a specific human being in a specific situation. Not a segment. Not a persona with a stock photo. A person with a real problem and a real reason to either engage or ignore what is about to be said to them.

It has one objective. Stated plainly, in terms of what should be different in the audience after this communication than it was before.

It carries a proposition that someone in the room was willing to argue for, not one that everyone was willing to accept. The brief that nobody disagreed with is the brief that nobody believed in strongly enough to fight for.

And it contains an honest account of what the organisation actually knows about this audience. Not what it assumes. Not what it hopes is true. What it has learned. The brief built on genuine insight is the brief that gives creative work somewhere real to go.

The best brief is not the one that gives the agency the most information. It is the one that gives them the clearest decision.

The campaign that changes something begins long before the creative team enters the room. It begins when someone in the organisation decides to treat the brief as the strategic act it was always meant to be, rather than the gate they pass through to get to the interesting part.

That decision is not a creative one. It is a leadership one. And it is where the work either starts well or does not start at all.

About the author

Brand/March 2026

You Are Not Building a Brand. You Are Building a Reputation You Cannot Control.

Walk into any brand strategy session and the conversation follows a familiar sequence. Define the positioning. Align on the values. Agree on the tone of voice. Approve the visual system. Sign off the guidelines.

Then launch. And wait for the market to respond the way the document said it would.

It rarely does. Not completely. Not on schedule. Not in the way that was planned in the room.

Not because the strategy was wrong. But because the strategy only controlled one half of the equation.

The other half belongs to everyone who was not in that room.

Every organisation gets to decide what it wants its brand to mean. Only the market gets to decide what its reputation actually is.

The Audience Has Always Been an Editor

There is a version of brand-building that treats the audience as a receiver. The brand transmits. The audience absorbs. Enough frequency and enough consistency, the thinking goes, and the desired perception will take hold.

That model made a certain kind of sense when the channels were few and the feedback loop was slow. A brand could spend years projecting a version of itself before the market had the tools to challenge it publicly.

Those conditions no longer exist. The audience has always been an editor, capable of rewriting the story in real time, through what they share, what they say, and what they choose not to believe. The difference now is that their version travels faster than yours. And in most cases, it is more trusted.

This is not a digital problem. It is not a social media problem. It is a structural reality about how reputation is formed, and it has always been true. The platforms only made it visible.

Reputation is not built in the briefing room. It is assembled, piece by piece, from every interaction your organisation was not prepared for.

What Brands Say and What Organisations Do Are Different Conversations

The most consistent finding across markets and sectors is this: the gap between brand promise and organisational behaviour is where reputation goes wrong.

Not in the campaign. Not in the visual identity. Not in the tone of voice framework.

In the moment a customer was told one thing and experienced another. In the decision a leader made under pressure that did not reflect the values on the wall. In the way an organisation behaved when no one senior was watching.

These are not edge cases. They are the raw material of reputation. And no communication investment neutralises them, because audiences do not weigh brand messages against lived experiences. They simply discard the message and keep the experience.

The organisations that understand this stop treating brand and culture as parallel workstreams. They understand that culture is not the background to the brand. It is the brand, made visible through behaviour rather than through positioning.

What an organisation says about itself is a hypothesis. How it behaves under pressure is the proof the market actually reads.

Three Moments When Reputation Moves Without Permission

The first is the internal leak. Organisations are not sealed systems. What is genuinely believed inside a business eventually surfaces outside it, through how people speak about their work, how they describe leadership, how they respond when asked honestly whether the company lives what it claims. A brand identity built on values that are not operationally real is not a brand. It is a liability waiting for the right moment to become visible.

The second is the pressure test. Reputation is not formed in normal conditions. It is formed when something goes wrong, when a product fails, a decision backfires, a crisis arrives unannounced. In those moments, the audience is not evaluating the brand. They are evaluating the character of the organisation. Brands that have built genuine trust survive these moments. Those that have only managed their image do not.

The third is the contextual shift. Markets move. Values evolve. An audience that accepted a certain kind of communication five years ago may find it inadequate today, not because the brand changed, but because the world around it did. Reputation requires recalibration, not just repetition. The organisation that keeps projecting the same signal into a changed environment eventually finds the signal means something different from what was intended.

Reputation is most honest at the edges, in the moments of failure, pressure, and change that no brand strategy was designed to manage.

The Leaders Who Get This Make Different Decisions

There is a specific kind of leader who approaches brand differently. They are not less interested in how the organisation is perceived. They are more honest about what actually shapes that perception.

They ask different questions in the strategy session. Not only 'what do we want to be known for?' but 'what would someone find if they looked behind this?'. Not only 'how do we communicate this?' but 'is the thing we are communicating actually true?'.

They treat consistency as a behaviour standard, not a visual guideline. They understand that the most powerful brand signals are the ones sent without intending to, by how decisions are made, by who gets promoted, by what the organisation tolerates and what it does not.

And they are honest about the distance between the reputation they want and the one they have currently earned. That distance is not a communications problem. It is a leadership agenda.

The most effective brand investment any leader can make is closing the distance between what the organisation claims and what it actually does. Everything else is surface.

A New Question for the Strategy Session

The question that opens most brand strategy sessions is some version of: what do we want people to think of us?

It is not the wrong question. But it is an incomplete one.

The more useful question, the one that tends to produce more honest work, is: what do people currently think of us, and why?

That question requires a different kind of research. Not awareness tracking and brand attribute scores. Actual intelligence about what people say in the absence of the brand's own communications. What the people who left say. What the customers who did not return experienced. What the partners who chose a competitor found elsewhere.

That intelligence is uncomfortable. It is also the only accurate map of the gap between the brand being built and the reputation being formed.

The organisations willing to look at that map honestly, and to treat what they find there as a strategic input rather than a communications problem, are the ones building something the market will eventually reflect back to them.

The rest are producing brand documents that are persuasive inside the building and irrelevant outside it.

Building a brand is a choice. Earning a reputation is a consequence. The only strategy worth having is one that takes both seriously.

About the author

Brand/March 2026

Your brand guidelines are not protecting your brand. They are freezing it

For a long time, branding has borrowed its logic from classical music. Marketers are trained to believe that strength comes from precision, repetition, and control. A strong brand, we're told, should behave like a perfectly rehearsed orchestra, delivering the same performance, in the same way, every time, regardless of the audience or the moment.

In that mindset, brand guidelines become the sheet music, and leadership's role is to make sure no one improvises. Consistency is treated less as a strategic decision and more as a principle that should not be questioned.

The problem is not that consistency is wrong. The problem is the assumption behind it. Repetition does not automatically create meaning. It only creates familiarity. Meaning comes from relevance, timing, and the ability to respond to context. And that is where this classical model begins to break down.

The brands that feel most alive today do not operate like orchestras. They operate much closer to jazz ensembles.

The most powerful brands operating today do not behave like orchestras. They behave like jazz ensembles.

The Consistency Paradox: Lessons from a Jazz Ensemble

A world-class jazz ensemble does not reject structure. It depends on it. There is a shared understanding of the melody, the rhythm, the tempo, and the emotional direction of the piece. That shared understanding is what holds the performance together.

Within that structure, however, musicians are expected to respond. They listen to each other, adjust their energy, and make decisions in real time. No two performances are identical, not because discipline is absent, but because interpretation is part of the craft.

This is where the comparison matters. The identity remains stable, even as the expression shifts. What changes is not the core, but the way it is brought to life in the moment.

The jazz musician does not ask, 'Did I play this note exactly the same way I did last night?' They ask, 'Did this note connect with the audience in this moment?' Somewhere along the way, modern branding lost sight of this distinction. We became obsessed with playing the same song on repeat and mistook that obsession for strategic rigor. In doing so, we preserved form while steadily eroding relevance.

This is not inconsistency. It is resonance.

The AI Homogenization Crisis: The New Face of Irrelevance

What was once a philosophical concern has now become a structural threat.

The rapid rise of generative AI represents the single greatest accelerant of brand sameness in a generation. As organisations rush to deploy identical tools for content creation, social media management, and customer service, a predictable pattern is emerging. Brands are not becoming clearer. They are becoming indistinguishable.

The grammar is flawless. The tone is relentlessly polite. The messaging is optimised for algorithms rather than people. AI, in its current form, is extraordinarily effective at enforcing consistency. But it is a consistency of mediocrity, a gravitational pull toward the generic. It produces brands that sound competent, correct, and entirely forgettable.

In this environment, strategic inconsistency is no longer an intellectual indulgence or a creative experiment. It is a competitive necessity. When every organisation has access to the same infinite content engine, differentiation no longer comes from volume, speed, or technical execution. It comes from judgment, from taste, and from the willingness to sound human when machines are doing the talking.

AI will make consistency cheap. Meaning will become scarce.

The Two Saudi Arabias: Why Consistency Becomes Challenging in a Hyper-Growth Market

Saudi Arabia is often spoken about as a single market. Structurally, that description is convenient. In reality, it rarely reflects how things actually play out.

What exists today is not one unified environment, but several realities unfolding at the same time. One is grounded in institutional structures, clear hierarchies, and long-established patterns of top-down communication. It values authority, clarity, and continuity. Another is shaped by global exposure, digital behaviour, and a younger audience that has grown accustomed to interaction rather than instruction. This audience does not wait to be addressed. It expects relevance, participation, and a voice in the exchange.

Anyone who has worked inside a Saudi campaign cycle has seen where tension begins to surface. Brands attempt to speak to this complexity through a single, unchanged expression. What feels composed and reassuring in one context can feel distant in another. A message intended to signal authority may be read as confidence by one audience and rigidity by another. Over time, the same brand voice, left unadjusted, begins to carry different meanings depending on who is listening.

This tension is rarely abstract. It shows up at the point where decisions are made. Teams debate whether to preserve a formal tone that reassures senior stakeholders or adopt a more conversational approach that resonates with younger audiences. Visual systems are approved for their elegance, yet quietly questioned for their emotional distance.

On paper, everything looks aligned. On the ground, it often feels less so.

In a market moving at the speed of Saudi Vision 2030, these differences do not fade with time. They become more pronounced. Change amplifies contrast. Consistency, on its own, stops being a strength and starts becoming a constraint. The real task is not simplification. It is orchestration, designing brand systems that can hold a clear core while responding intelligently to different contexts.

And the brands that recognise this early tend to move with the market, not chase it.

Strategic Inconsistency Is Often Misunderstood

While it is frequently presented as a progressive response to complexity, it is not inherently virtuous. It is a high-risk instrument, and when applied without discipline, it can erode trust faster than rigid consistency ever could.

Strategic inconsistency fails most often when brands confuse flexibility with absence of definition. A jazz ensemble only works because the core melody is non-negotiable. When a brand's purpose, positioning, and value system are unclear or weak, variation does not feel adaptive; it feels unstable. What was intended as contextual intelligence is perceived as a lack of identity.

It also fails when inconsistency is distributed rather than governed. When teams, agencies, or regions are empowered to 'adapt the brand' without a shared decision-making framework, inconsistency stops being strategic and becomes political. Each expression may make sense in isolation, but together they produce a fragmented narrative that no longer resolves into a coherent brand experience. The difference between strategic inconsistency and brand chaos is not creative talent; it is governance.

The line between healthy flexibility and destructive fragmentation is therefore not subjective. It is structural. Strategic inconsistency only works when the core is fixed, the edges are intentionally flexible, and the system for deciding when and how to adapt is explicit rather than implied.

The Internal Politics of Inconsistency: How to Sell the Unsellable

In practice, the logic is rarely the problem. The internal reality is.

No CEO, board, or executive committee explicitly asks for inconsistency. Careers are built on delivering stability, predictability, and clean brand metrics. CMOs are rewarded for control, not for calculated risk taken in ambiguous territory. Even when the strategic case is sound, the organisational instinct is defensive.

This is where most arguments for strategic inconsistency fail. Not because they are wrong, but because they are framed as requests for permission. And permission is rarely granted when the language feels disruptive rather than necessary. Inside most organisations, inconsistency is heard as loss of control long before it is understood as a response to changing context.

The breakthrough comes from changing the frame of the conversation entirely. The question is not whether rules should be broken. It is whether relevance is being protected. In fast-moving markets, the cost of sounding tone-deaf often exceeds the perceived risk of sounding different. The real risk is not variation. It is irrelevance that goes unnoticed because it remains technically 'on-brand.'

This is why philosophy rarely changes minds inside organisations. Data does. Show the gradual engagement decline among younger audiences. Show the social commentary that quietly mocks formal, over-scripted language. Show the churn created by experiences that are compliant with brand guidelines yet disconnected from lived reality. When inconsistency is positioned as a response to observable signals rather than a creative impulse, resistance begins to soften.

The real risk is not sounding different. It is remaining on-brand while becoming irrelevant.

Beyond Brand Tracking: A New Measurement Framework

Traditional brand tracking measures memory. It shows how consistently a message has been repeated and recalled. In many ways, it functions like a metronome: precise and reliable, yet incapable of telling you whether the music actually resonates.

What organisations increasingly need is not a replacement for brand tracking, but a complementary system, one that preserves discipline while making room for flexibility, relevance, and contextual response. Not to justify randomness or creative drift, but to make adaptation measurable, intentional, and defensible.

Three frameworks are worth examining in practice:

The Brand Elasticity Score examines how much variation a brand can absorb across tone, framing, or visual language before trust begins to shift. Stability under variation signals elasticity. Sharp drops in confidence signal brittleness.

The Contextual Relevance Index examines whether a brand felt present in the moment it spoke. Are audiences echoing the brand's words, referencing timing, or demonstrating situational awareness? Recognition signals relevance. Generic responses signal a missed moment.

The Audience Fragmentation Coefficient examines how differently audiences respond across segments and whether that divergence is intentional. High variance can signal meaningful engagement across contexts. It becomes a risk only when responses reflect conflicting values rather than varied expressions of the same core.

From Repetition to Relevance

For years, brand strength has been evaluated through stability. Consistency became proof of control, and control became a proxy for trust. Dashboards appeared clean. Metrics looked steady. On paper, alignment seemed intact.

Across markets, however, a different pattern has emerged. Audiences disengage quietly. Language remains correct but feels distant. Experiences stay on-brand while failing to be useful. What traditional brand tracking captures well is recall, not response. Familiarity, not relevance.

In hyper-growth markets, the brands that endure are not those that repeat themselves most reliably. They are those that understand what must remain fixed and where adaptation is required. Coherence, in these environments, comes from intent rather than uniformity.

The strategic question is therefore not whether change is risky. It is whether insisting on sameness is quietly eroding relevance. Answering that question requires more than instinct. It requires measurement designed for complexity, not just consistency.

About the author

Digital/March 2026

Stop Calling It Digital Transformation. You're Just Catching Up.

For the better part of a decade, Digital Transformation has been the answer to every corporate prayer. It is the magic phrase that promises relevance, efficiency, and a future-proof business. Boards approve it. Consultants sell it. Leaders announce it with slides that contain arrows pointing upward and words like 'agile,' 'ecosystem,' and 'disruption.'

But there is a problem we rarely talk about. Most of what we call transformation is not transformation at all.

It is just catching up.

Launching a new app, migrating to the cloud, or adopting a CRM are not acts of revolutionary genius. They are the cost of entry. They are the starting line, not the finish line.

It's Not Progress. It's a Race to the Starting Line.

Think about it. When a business in the 1920s finally replaced its horse and carriage with a Ford Model T, was that a transformation? No. It was survival. It was adopting the new standard to simply stay in the race.

Launching a new app, migrating to the cloud, or adopting a CRM today is no different. These are not acts of revolutionary genius; they are the cost of entry in the modern economy. Every competitor has access to the same tools, the same platforms, the same vendors. The technology itself stopped being a differentiator the moment it became widely available. What remains is the question that most organisations are not yet honest enough to ask: are we actually doing anything different, or are we just doing the same things with newer equipment?

Confusing these two, catching up versus truly transforming, is more than just a semantic error. It is a costly mistake that burns out your best people, inflates your technology budget, and creates a dangerous illusion of progress while the gap between you and genuinely evolving organisations continues to widen.

The Busywork Trap: Why Your Teams Are Exhausted

We have fallen into a trap of celebrating activity instead of achievement. We launch a new platform and celebrate, but we never stop to ask, 'Did this actually make a customer's life better?' We are simply digitising the same old broken processes and calling it innovation.

This is where the human cost becomes painfully clear. Brilliant, passionate people become exhausted and cynical. Why? Because they are trapped in the Transformation Theatre. They are asked to lead a 'transformation,' but are given no real power to challenge the outdated thinking that holds the company back. They are measured on whether the project launched on time, not on whether it created any real value.

The tragedy is not inefficiency. The tragedy is the waste of capability. The people asked to lead these initiatives are often the most capable, the most motivated, the most willing to take risks. Organisations extract their energy to deliver projects that preserve the status quo under a different name, then wonder why those same people leave or go quiet.

This is not just bad for morale; it is bad for business. Your most talented people do not leave because the work is hard. They leave because the work feels meaningless. They see the gap between the buzzwords and the reality, and they get tired of playing a part in the show.

Your most talented people don't leave because the work is hard. They leave because the work feels meaningless.

Catching Up vs. Truly Evolving: The Difference That Matters

The distinction is not subtle. It shows up in the questions your team is asking, the metrics your leadership is tracking, and the decisions that get made when resources are constrained.

When you are just catching up, the conversation inside the organisation is about implementation. Which system do we choose? When does it go live? How do we train people? Success is defined by delivery, on time, on budget, with minimal disruption to the existing structure. The underlying assumption is that the current way of doing things is correct, and the task is simply to make it faster or more efficient.

When you are truly evolving, the conversation is entirely different. The question is not 'How do we do this faster?' It is 'Should we still be doing this at all?' Strategy is rethought before systems are selected. The customer's experience is the design brief, not an afterthought. Success is measured not by whether the platform launched, but by whether the relationship with the customer actually changed.

The difference is profound. One is about speed. The other is about direction. And you cannot compensate for moving in the wrong direction by moving faster.

You cannot compensate for moving in the wrong direction by moving faster.

A Lesson from Saudi Vision 2030: It's About Purpose, Not Platforms

Real transformation is never about the technology itself. It is about fundamentally changing the relationship between an organisation and the people it serves. This was evident across initiatives aligned with Saudi Vision 2030, where the challenge was not just to modernise government services, but to reimagine the entire relationship between the state and its citizens.

The easy path would have been to simply digitise existing processes and call it progress. But the real ambition was far deeper: to shift from a model of one-way broadcasting to genuine, two-way dialogue. To move from opaque bureaucracy to radical transparency. To transform government entities from distant authorities into partners and service providers.

That shift required something no technology vendor could deliver. It required people inside those institutions to accept a different definition of their own role. That is always the hardest part, not the platform selection, not the system integration, but the human decision to let go of an identity built around control and authority, and replace it with one built around service and responsiveness.

The experience taught three lessons that apply to any organisation serious about change.

From Outputs to Outcomes

The easy path would have been to create social media accounts for government bodies and declare the mission accomplished. That would have been catching up, and the success metric would have been an output: 'Did we launch the account?' But the real mandate was far deeper. The goal was to transform the very nature of how institutions engaged with the public, from broadcasting to listening, from announcement to dialogue.

Success was not launching a platform. It was building trust. And trust is not measured in follower counts or post frequency. It is measured in whether people feel heard, whether they choose to engage, and whether the relationship between them and the institution actually changed. Stop measuring activity and start measuring the impact on the relationship with your customer. That is the only metric that tells you whether transformation is real.

Technology as Vehicle, Not Destination

Technology was just the vehicle for the real transformation, which was a change in mindset. The destination was not a new app or a cloud server; it was a new culture of radical transparency and partnership. It required a deep shift in how institutions saw their own role, not as distant authorities who communicate downward, but as partners who are accountable upward, to the people they serve.

This is the error most digital transformation programmes make. They treat the technology as the destination and the culture change as a secondary concern. In reality, the technology is the easiest part. Selecting a system takes months. Changing how people think about their role, their responsibilities, and their relationship with the people they serve takes years. The tool is not the goal. The real work is changing the culture and the purpose that the tool is meant to serve.

Change the Role, Not Just the Process

Digitising an old, broken process does not create transformation; it just makes a bad process faster. True change begins when an organisation is willing to question not just how it does things, but why those things exist in the first place. The most powerful moments in transformation work are not when a new system goes live. They are when someone in a meeting asks, 'Why are we still doing this?' and the room goes quiet because no one has a good answer.

Catching up is about changing your tools. Transformation is about changing your purpose and your role. The organisations that understand this distinction will build something that endures. Those that do not will keep launching platforms and wondering why nothing fundamentally changes.

Catching up is about changing your tools. Transformation is about changing your purpose.

Beyond Transformation: The Shift to Strategic Evolution

Perhaps the phrase 'Digital Transformation' has outlived its usefulness. It suggests a project with a beginning and an end, a mountain to be climbed and then conquered, a initiative to be completed and then celebrated. But in today's world, there is no finish line. There is only constant, unending change.

The organisations that are building genuine competitive advantage are not the ones that completed their transformation. They are the ones that stopped thinking about transformation as a destination and started treating change as a permanent operating condition.

A better framework is Strategic Evolution. Evolution is not a project; it is a permanent state of being. It is a commitment to building an organisation that is perpetually learning, adapting, and improving, one that does not wait for a crisis to force change, but treats anticipation and adaptation as core competencies. It is less about dramatic, one-off disruptions and more about creating a resilient culture that is designed to thrive in conditions of continuous uncertainty.

The organisations that will lead their industries in ten years are not currently planning their next transformation. They are building the capability to evolve continuously, at every level, without needing to stop and restart every few years under a new programme name.

Are You Defending the Past or Creating the Future?

The question every leader needs to answer honestly is not 'Are we transforming?' It is 'What are we actually measuring, and what does that tell us about what we value?'

Look at your team's core metrics. Are you primarily measuring how fast you complete old tasks? Or are you measuring how effectively you are solving new problems? Are you celebrating the launch of a system, or the change in a customer relationship? Are you rewarding people for delivering projects on time, or for questioning whether the project should exist at all? The answers reveal whether transformation is happening or whether it is being performed.

Digital transformation is not a technology project; it is a system of change that requires alignment across leadership, culture, and operations simultaneously. Fostering genuine collaboration between your technology, marketing, and operations teams on a single, customer-focused outcome is more transformative than launching a dozen new platforms. This requires leadership that is willing to break down the structures that protect silos, not just technology that connects systems while leaving those structures intact.

The future will not be led by the companies that are the best at using today's technology. It will be led by those who are the best at building a new way of thinking, about their customers, their role, and the value they are genuinely creating. The real work is not about digital. It never was. It is about leadership.

So, the final question is not just whether you are transforming. It is: Are you building an organisation that is designed to perpetually evolve, or one that is simply designed to last? The former is the essence of leadership. The latter is a defence of the past. And in a market that does not slow down for either, the difference between those two answers is the difference between relevance and irrelevance.

About the author

Growth/March 2026

The Next Phase of Growth Will Not Be Funded. It Will Be Thought.

There is a version of ambition in this region that is easy to recognize. A new project. A large budget. A launch date. The belief that if you move fast enough and spend enough, the results will follow.

For a while, that approach worked.

The first phase of growth across Saudi Arabia and the GCC was largely about who had the resources to move first. Capital, access, and scale were real advantages. Entire industries were built. Destinations that did not exist a decade ago are now globally recognized. The investment was justified, and the results were visible.

But something has changed. And the leaders who are paying attention can feel it.

The Audience Has Moved. Most Strategies Have Not.

People across this region are more globally exposed, more digitally connected, and more selective than at any point before. They are not waiting to be impressed. They are deciding, quickly and often quietly, whether what is in front of them is worth their time and their trust.

In that environment, being visible is no longer enough. A campaign that reaches everyone but means nothing to anyone will perform exactly as it deserves to. It will be seen. And forgotten.

The organizations that are pulling ahead are not always the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones that took the time to understand what they are actually trying to say, to whom, and why it should matter to that person on that day.

That is a thinking problem. Not a funding problem.

Clarity Is the Scarcest Thing in a Fast-Moving Market.

This region is moving at extraordinary speed. New sectors, new audiences, new competitors, all arriving at the same time. The natural response is to move fast, spend broadly, and figure out the message later.

The cost of that approach is rarely obvious in the short term. Campaigns go out. Events happen. The numbers look reasonable. The work continues.

What erodes slowly, and without much warning, is the thing that cannot be bought in the next budget cycle. The trust that comes from an audience that understands not just what you do, but why you exist and why they should care.

When that trust is gone, recovering it is not simply a matter of a larger campaign. The audience that has already decided you are not worth their attention is the hardest audience to win back.

The Leaders Building Something That Lasts Are Asking Different Questions.

The executives and founders who are defining the next phase of growth in this region share one thing. It has nothing to do with their sector or their budget. They are asking better questions.

Not "How do we reach more people?" but "What do we need to mean to the people who matter?"

Not "How do we grow faster?" but "What needs to be in place before growth becomes sustainable?"

Not "How do we compete?" but "What are we building, and why would someone choose us over everything else available to them?"

These are not luxury questions for when things slow down. They are the questions that determine whether growth leads somewhere or simply continues.

Across enough rooms in this region, it becomes clear that those questions are not always asked before the budget is approved. And enough work struggles, not because the execution was poor, but because the thinking that should have come before it was skipped in the interest of speed.

Investment without clarity is not strategy. It is activity.

This Is Not an Argument Against Investment.

The scale of what is being built here, in tourism, culture, entertainment, technology, and beyond, is real and significant. The ambition is justified. The resources are being deployed at a pace that has no recent parallel.

But investment without clarity is not strategy. It is activity. And over time, the difference between the two shows up in the numbers that are hardest to manufacture, loyalty, trust, and the quiet decision an audience makes about whether a brand belongs in their life or simply passed through it.

The organizations that look back on this period as the one in which they built something lasting will not be the ones that outspent everyone else.

They will be the ones that out-thought them.

About the author

Technology/2026

AI Is Rewriting the Marketing Operating Model

The disruption is not the output. It is the operating model underneath it.

For two decades, marketing teams were organised around scarcity: scarce creative capacity, scarce production time, scarce analytical bandwidth. Generative systems remove much of that scarcity almost overnight, and that changes the shape of the work, not only its speed.

The first instinct is to use these tools to do the same things faster. More variations, more copy, more iterations in less time. That instinct is understandable and almost entirely wrong. Faster sameness is not an advantage. It is noise produced at scale.

The Bottleneck Moves to Judgment

When ideation, drafting, and deployment collapse into a single continuous motion, the constraint shifts. The scarce resource is no longer production. It is judgment. Who decides what is worth making? Who protects the strategy when the cost of producing almost anything approaches zero?

The teams that win will not be the ones with the most tools. They will be the ones that rebuild their process around a smaller number of better decisions, then use the machine to execute those decisions relentlessly and consistently.

In a world where anyone can produce everything, the scarce resource is the discipline to produce the right thing.

Media/2026

The GCC Creator Economy Enters Its Institutional Era

The influencer transaction is maturing into something far more durable.

For years, brands and government entities in the Gulf treated creators as a media buy: a post, a reach number, a campaign window. The relationship began with a brief and ended when the invoice was paid.

That model is quietly being replaced. The most sophisticated organisations now build long-term partnerships with creators who own genuine, durable audiences, treating them as channels in their own right rather than as rented attention.

An Institutional Shift, Not a Tactical One

This requires governance, briefing discipline, and a tolerance for editorial independence that many institutions still find uncomfortable. It moves creators from the margins of the media plan to the centre of the communication strategy.

The creators who benefit most are not the ones with the largest followings. They are the ones with the clearest identity and the most defensible trust with a specific audience.

Reach can be bought. Trust has to be partnered with.

Tourism/2026

Destination Marketing Is Becoming Nation Branding

When a destination scales globally, it stops marketing a place and starts positioning a country.

A decade ago, destination marketing in the region was largely about awareness: put the place on the map, attract the visitor, fill the hotel. The metrics were arrivals and occupancy.

As Gulf destinations scale toward global relevance, the brief changes. Every cultural event, every conservation programme, every flagship opening now carries a second meaning. It says something about the nation behind it.

Two Disciplines Become One

This collapses the old separation between tourism communication and national positioning. The two have become the same discipline, operating at different altitudes. You can no longer brief a destination campaign without understanding the sovereign narrative it sits inside.

For practitioners, the implication is significant. The stakeholders who guard the national story are now stakeholders in the destination story, and the work has to be built to satisfy both.

The destination is the message. The nation is the meaning.

Strategy/2026

Vision 2030 Shifts Communications From Output to Outcome

The question is no longer how much was published. It is what changed.

For most of its history, communication was measured in output: campaigns launched, impressions delivered, coverage secured. These were easy to count and easy to celebrate.

Vision 2030 introduced a different standard. Institutions are increasingly judged not on what they communicated but on what shifted as a result: behaviour, perception, participation, trust.

Harder, Slower, More Honest

This forces communication out of the activity trap and into the accountability of measurable impact. The teams that adapt are building outcome measurement into planning from the first day, not retrofitting it at the end.

The teams that do not adapt will keep producing impressive numbers that explain nothing, mistaking volume for value until the gap becomes impossible to ignore.

Output proves you were busy. Outcome proves you mattered.

Environment/2026

Sustainability Messaging Moves From Pledge to Proof

The era of the ambitious commitment is giving way to the era of the verifiable claim.

Environmental communication has spent years in the language of pledges: targets, commitments, and ambitions set for distant dates. That language is rapidly losing its power.

Audiences have grown sceptical, and scrutiny has grown precise. A claim without evidence is now a liability rather than an asset, and the gap between what is promised and what is proven is where reputations are lost.

A Discipline of Data

This turns sustainability communication into a discipline of evidence. The work is no longer to declare intent persuasively but to translate verified progress into a narrative the public can trust.

For organisations in conservation and sustainability, this is an opportunity. Those with real progress to show now hold a structural advantage over those with only ambition to announce.

A pledge buys attention once. Proof earns trust repeatedly.