Why can’t I find international brands from the Middle East?

By Marie Succar

As brand designers and consultants in the Middle East, it’s our everyday challenge to push our clients’ boundaries and help them take a quantum leap into the future. With our work with Aldar, one of Abu Dhabi’s largest developers, we challenged conventions and told the story of people and quality of life. With the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and the Qatar Foundation (QF), we turned His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani’s private art collection into a community institution and a leading voice on Arab Modern and Contemporary art in the region. We also collaborate and promote innovators such as Dr. Hayat Sindi and her project,  i2 Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity. 

Saying this, I do feel disheartened by seeing only one or two brands from the Middle East that have made it globally. Thank god for Emirates Airlines!

Thanks to the global reach of companies like Google, Apple and Starbucks, Middle Easterners experience the impact of global brands everyday. We watch them closely and take comfort in being able to tell the difference between someone else’s good or bad design. Like all other people around the globe we follow trends and argue loudly over whether we should buy the iPhone or the latest Samsung, over which is better or more user friendly. Most of us are trend followers to an extent where I wonder if this comfortable feeling of following rather than pioneering results is dampening our ambition to create our own movements. 

Who are the Steve Jobs, the Richard Bransons and the Ratan Tatas from this part of the world? As a region we’ve got the people, the brains and the financial resources. But what sort of ingredient are we missing to take our brands from a home grown Fattoush salad to a universal Caesar?

This is by no means a post to criticize or revive nostalgia of our past glories, we’ve had enough of that. I’m just taking the opportunity, with all the changes happening around us, to ask if this could be the time for another sort of movement. One that doesn’t involve any sort of aggression but surely involves ambition and an unstoppable drive to become global. Can’t we Arabs do better?

Liechtenstein for all, by all

By Moussa Beidas

Bordered by Switzerland to the west and south, and by Austria to the east, this small principality is dubbed by most as the Monaco of Eastern Europe. It shares a lot of similarities with its French namesake, including the second lowest unemployment rate in the world (Monaco is 1st) as well as the highest gross domestic product per person anywhere. But thats probably where the similarities end in the eyes of those behind the Liechtenstein brand. It underwent a branding exercise in 2004 with Wolff Olins London and since then has been positioned as a sophisticated capital destination with an influx in tourism and a strong entrepreneurial spirit. 

Fast forward to 2012 and Liechtenstein is pushing the reboot button with the same spirit it had back in 2004. It has asked design agencies around Europe to submit their thoughts on what Liechtenstein should look like now and will then put those ideas forward to the principality’s 30,000 citizens. Having such an accountable population really helps makes the job a lot easier. 

With the global economy slowly rising from the ashes, an increasing number of brands and the people behind them are using the opportunity to latch on to people’s new found spending confidence. Destination brands are gaining popularity by the minute, because people are looking for a change in scenery.

It goes beyond looking for new places to visit, and onto new ways to get there. Emirates airlines is another brand focusing on a massive global refresh, moving from Keep Discovering, to Hello Tomorrow. If the trend is to hold water, then brands all over are going to begin to appeal to the masses and their aspirations, and Liechtenstein will probably be following suite.  

Watch this space for updates on which new Liechtenstein is chosen. 

@mousabeidas

Sincerely Anonymous

As an exercise in visual language, our senior designer Mads Jakob Poulsen, recently decided to explore what it might look like if Anonymous ”went corporate.”

His website describes the project:

“With the group being more and more in the media they could need to button up and streamline their appearance to appear more professional whilst unifying the brand experience.

The logotype/mark is anti-authoritative and obviously completely illegible, to stick with the roots of the anarchistic group.”

See more of the project here: http://madsjakobpoulsen.com/?work=anonymous

When diffusion means dilution for retailers

By Danielle Zezulinski

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about designer collaborations. Not just strategizing how I can be front of the queue when Marni for H&M drops on Thursday, nor consoling myself for not being able to get a pair of J.W. Anderson for Aldo Rise shoes in my size.

Rather, I’ve been fascinated by the positive attention and energy that diffusion ranges generate for retailers. From Target’s groundbreaking Go! Collection to H&M delivering runway style to the masses, the designer collaboration has become the most widely anticipated fashion event a retailer can launch. With the right name, a previously ignored retailer can gain traction with even the most discerning of fashionistas.

Which leads me to think that designer collaborations have neatly separated retailers into two camps: those with strong, recognizable product propositions that customers seek out, and those who need to partner with independent talent to bolster their brands’ credentials.

And for those retailers in the second camp, I wonder whether any of the positive buzz generated by these collaborations ever penetrates their internal teams. Are these retailers missing a trick by continually looking outwards for the vision of vibrancy and relevance they know their customers want, rather than seeking an alliance that helps them make fundamental shifts in how they themselves go to market? Wouldn’t it be more sustainable to bring in talent that not only provides innovative products but also revolutionary ways of thinking and working?   

It seems to be a wasted opportunity for retailers, when they do invest in a brand partnership, not to insist that the relationship include an element of learning from the designer or innovator. Whether it’s about trends, customers, color, technical craft, or simply about how to think about products in a new way, designer collaborations could be a really powerful way for retailers to promote innovation internally and strengthen their offer overall – not just for a season.

As brand consultants, we should also use this as an object lesson for the engagements we enter with clients. Rather than bring them a solution pre-packaged, ready to go out to market, we need to think about how we can help clients embody the change we deliver so that they can help themselves moving forward. It’s not working ourselves out of work – it’s about an organic change process that benefits everyone.

Image: H&M via WWD

$20 billion doesn’t cut it, for print

A post by the Atlantic called “The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph” was one of the most shared pieces in the marketing and advertising world last week.

Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011. $20 billion sounds big, but it isn’t enough for an industry built to support double or triple that. In the next few years we’ll see papers and magazines continue to invest in their websites. 

In this atmosphere, with major players and large investments at stake, designers and design-minded leaders have an opportunity to win big by developing new ideas for news presentation and delivery. At Wolff Olins NY, Lisa Smith and Kate Nielsen recently blogged about the “Future of News” panel at NYC Advertising Week and their experiences “designing the news.”

Read their post here: http://blog.wolffolins.com/post/18444219700/designing-the-news