Most marketing knowledge is written in and for the US and Western Europe, then imported here as if markets were interchangeable. They are not. I have run campaigns from Beirut for years, worked with clients across the Gulf, spoken at events from Dubai to Manama, and taught professionals from across the region. The differences are not exotic details. They change what works.
The language is not a translation problem
The region runs on a live mix: Arabic, English, French in Lebanon, and the real language of daily life, which is code-switching between them mid-sentence. Campaigns translated from English into formal Arabic read like government announcements. The brands that win write natively in the register their audience actually types, and that register differs between Beirut, Riyadh and Dubai. This is why "just localise it" is the most expensive small line in a regional brief.
Trust runs through people, not brands
In markets with strong institutions, a brand's word carries weight on its own. Here, trust is interpersonal. Recommendations, community, the founder's face and reputation, the person who teaches or explains: these outperform brand advertising by a distance. It is why creator and influencer work is not a tactic in MENA but the backbone, and why a known individual fronting a company outperforms the company's own channel almost every time. My own bet on personal reputation, from the stage to the book, is this observation applied to myself.
Budgets force honesty
Lebanese budgets, in particular, do not tolerate the waste that large-market playbooks quietly assume. There is no room for six-month brand experiments. This constraint is secretly an advantage: teams here learn performance discipline, measurement and creativity-per-dollar earlier and harder than their counterparts abroad, which is exactly why Gulf and international companies increasingly hire Lebanese marketers, remotely and on-site.
The Gulf is not one market either
Treating the GCC as a single audience is the imported playbook's second favourite mistake. Purchasing power, regulation, platform mix and cultural lines differ sharply between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the rest. What they share is pace: the Gulf adopts new platforms and AI tools faster than almost anywhere, and government-led digital agendas keep pulling the market forward. A campaign calendar built for European adoption speed arrives here late.
What stays the same
The fundamentals do not move with geography: a clear offer, one route to it built fully, honest measurement, and judgment about what to say and to whom. The region changes the inputs, never the logic.
That mix, global fundamentals with regional reality, is what I teach through Talentdu and apply in advisory. The playbooks are imported. The judgment cannot be.