Incito MentisA blog by Syed Abdul Karim

You could be excused for thinking that Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries in the world! With a GDP per capita in the Top 50s and estimated cash reserves of over $500 billion at the end of 2010 prove this! Add to that the news of Qatar being the richest nation in the world on the basis of GDP per capita, the image of this regions riches is further perpetuated. What if I were to tell you that this is only half the story? And the other half is a complete paradox of what most would expect about Saudi Arabia.

Did you know that in a nation of 27 million only 10% of the population is making more than $4000 per month? With people in a government job making less than $1000 a month and those in a private company making about $2000 a month. This shows the great divide between the rich and the poor. The situation gets even worse when one looks at the impending real estate crisis prevailing today. On one hand we have some families who own more land than anyone can imagine and on the other there are thousands if not millions struggling to own a home. For perspective the Kindgom needs about 2 million new housing units over the next 10 years but the government is unable to do anything about it apparently because there is no vacant land available. There has been a royal decree to build 500,000 housing units with no project end date in sight. Why? The land owners have no incentive to sell. For a city like Riyadh, 50% of the land is vacant and unused. We are talking about 800 sq. km. of prime real estate laid to waste. With more demand and an artificially created shortage of land the average Saudi is forced to not only forget about ever owning a home (with a basic apartment costing about $150,000) but pay about $8,000 to $10,000 in annual rent on an income of about $24,000 per annum.

Add to this a bustling youth population of 5 million in the age bracket 18-30 with about 10% unemployed. We can expect one half of this segment – the men looking to marry and hoping to save about $20,000 as dowry. When you look at the complete picture the equation simply does not add up. Either they are going to be homeless or single! This is one aspect of the paradoxes that prevail in Saudi Arabia. A paradox that has been captured on film and recently exposed through social media. One is the short film “Monopoly” – an inspiring dark comedy made to raise awareness about the impending real estate crisis . The film was produced and directed by Bader Al-Hamoud. So far it had received over 1 million views (1.46 million to be exact!). You can check out the film with English subtitles here.

The other is a series of short films titled “”Mal3ob3lena”by Firas Bakna, a Saudi Blogger who went out to the poor districts of Riyadh to give the “have’s” a true picture of the “have not’s”. The total views on his YouTube channel for all “Mal3ob3lena” related videos exceeds 3 million. You can check out the film with English subtitles here (the video is blocked in Saudi Arabia).

What is the key learning? The paradoxes that exist across all aspects of Saudi life are not as apparent and this is something we as marketers often tend to overlook. If these paradoxes are real and deeply rooted then FMCG companies, for example might have to rethink all the key elements of their Marketing Mix. We have seen Hindustan Lever in India realizing this fact and customizing their SKU’s to meet the needs of the rural customer. They started using sachets as a big volume driver and at the same time have been engaging poor rural women as a network of saleswomen to not only drive product sales but be a source of employment for them as well. Similar kind of approaches might be be needed for Saudi Arabia as well that reflect these prevailing paradoxes. It could prove to be a win-win for both parties.

I originally wrote this post for the PDDB Blog – reposted from here!

I could not believe the impact the news of Steve Jobs’ death had on me. I had only known him as an iconic public figure like so many of our time but his passing felt like some dear relative had been taken away from me. I am simply overwhelmed and furthermore surprised to know that I am not the only one. The impact he had made through his vision, his passion and his humanity is far greater than anyone I have known in my lifetime. His work was nothing less than revolutionary but it was HOW everything he did at Apple embodied this spirit and perhaps it was this spirit that drew us all so close to him.

This September I completed my sixth year of working in Saudi Arabia as Planning Director for DDB. Through the years I have come across many different perspectives and researches on the country and it was not so long ago that I tried to assimilate my learning and chalk out a point-of-view. It was triggered by the need to give an “outsider” – a client based out of Saudi Arabia an inside scoop on the market. The presentation was never made for whatever reason. Not seeing any use for it just lying around offline I decided to put it in the public domain online and share my perspective with the world.

Simply stated I believe Saudi Arabia is a very distinct country from a social and cultural context. It is unlike any other society where there would be minor extremes on both ends with a large majority in the middle. The parameters could be anything like the divide between modernity and tradition, rich and poor, from being culturally exposed to being culturally deprived etc. to name a few. For simplicity however, let’s just say that white is on one end, black on the other with gray in between. To my mind Saudi Arabia is one of those unique places in the world where there is a large white and a large black on either end, with a small gray in the middle. This is what makes Saudi Arabia a society of paradoxes, a society with extreme opposites co-existing together in large numbers. I cannot say if Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world which is so but I can surely say it is one of the few!

Below is my effort to put this perspective in a presentation form with supporting facts. Hope you find it both interesting and useful.

I am probably very wrong but in my opinion there is a huge downside to Web 2.0. Despite the numerous tools and filters available one can easily get carried away in this vast ocean of knowledge and data that is sweeping at currents faster than those that flow beneath Antartica!

Why do I say that? For the last two years I have been swimming in this ocean supposedly prepared. As a strategist it’s critical to keep a lookout for all the trends that could shape our future. Around 2002, we saw Web 2.0 emerge through tools like weblogs (commonly known as blogs) and RSS. Social Networking sites like Orkut and Myspace began to spring up as well. People could now engage in a dialogue, broadcast their point-of-view to the world and create their own content like any publisher. This was also the time when BlackBerry made email access ubiquitous and the buzzword of this era was “Information Overload”. In early 2009 Clay Shirky, a new media professor at NYU described the phenomenon not as a case of Information Overload but as a failure of filters.

Triggered by this thought I began my journey through this vast mountain of data. I setup Google Reader for my RSS feeds, neatly creating folders for all my topics of interests, from advertising and branding to telecom and trends. I searched the web for leading content across all Web 2.0 channels and over the years built a rich feed of content. I was an early adopter on social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook learning to divide and define the use for each. Joined the bandwagon of the “One with the Most Followers on Twitter is King” and soon realized the fallacy of this notion. Used Twitter lists to filter the relevant stuff again dividing them by my topics of interests and context – from family and friends, news, celebrities to my professional lists focusing on branding, planning and telecom to name a few! With the iPhone things became even simpler (or more complicated depending on how you see it!). After trying out a plethora of apps for feeds and tweets I settled with a few, checking in at least once every hour across platforms. I lost many followers as I would overtake the feed of newcomers by tweeting at a rate of one tweet a minute, sometimes even more! Eventually I learnt how to space out and manage tweets more professionally by using platforms like HootSuite.

The end result! I felt great. The dopamine kept kicking in. I felt like a guru on everything! From the latest news around the world to all those crazy memes taking over the web, I was in the know. Be it technology updates to what was happening in the ever-evolving world of social media to blog posts on all topics related to marketing and brand communications. I was smoking away on this illusive and addictive drug called “knowzac” (not really but you get the point). Having abandoned passive media like TV and newspapers, thinking they were for old timers and geeks I was riding the new media wave, feeling cool that I was in full control of what I consumed and when! (Or so it seemed…)

Then it hit me! I had cascaded from a being a content creator to a blatant consumer of content, sucking on everything that came my way taking out no time to analyze, think or contribute an original perspective. I learnt that even in the world of information and knowledge the plague of consumerism is a force to reckon with. My openness to consuming content from a wide variety of sources was driven by this belief that creativity is best enabled through a rich and diverse base of knowledge. If an idea is simply a fresh connection of two or more known thoughts then the depth of the pool is likely to create bigger, fresher ideas! What happened on the way was a halt to content creation and very limited critical thinking. I was reading more than I ever did in my life but I simply was not thinking enough because most content was very short and too diverse to really make sense of as a whole. However the satisfaction of reading lots of things and then sharing them online kept me away from doing the stuff that really counted.

How will I change my behavior going forward? I will try and do the following:

• Focus More: I see two ways of going about this. I would have to curate my lists and feeds even more and get rid of anyone or anything that is deviating me from my subjects of focus or make a mental note not to get carried away with interesting but nonconstructive blabber at least from a professional standpoint (not always easy to do though).
• Be Proactive: Choose a topic, dig deeper and explore enough to be able to come out with a distinct point of view. Be the one choosing what to read and get further into rather than vice versa.
• Think More: Even if serendipity is allowed whatever that comes across should be thought over, reflected upon and then internalized through a point of view. There should clearly by some thinking done after coming across anything new and interesting rather than just reading through it just for the sake of it.

I believe perhaps that by keeping the above points in mind I would be able to better utilize my time to not only gain knowledge but also to apply it meaningfully to my work. Hope this helps you too. If you have some learning and experiences of your own that you would like to share I am all ears (or eyes in this case!)

The world is moving at a zipping fast space. While you read this post the world have tweeted away at about 2200 Tweets per second,  Tumbled (is that what it’s called?) about 333 posts per second, Facebook’d about 12,000 status updates per second and sent about 280,000 emails per second. Not that these are a REAL measure of the pace of things but they sure are indicative of the life we live are embracing with each passing day.  The real question to ask at this point….does the world need to slow down?

I don’t know if it does but it clearly is feeling the need to. You often hear people complain that life is moving too fast and that time is passing by very quickly. So I decided to do what any savvy marketer would do, conduct some solid research and put an end to all the heresy. I went on Twitter to do my research and here is what I found. A New Jersey Girl, a Las Vegas dude, a Singaporean God Lover and a politician from Kosova all saying the same thing. Yes my dear readers this phenomena is truly global!

Is it time to slow down? If people from three continents are saying the same thing then it better be true! Right? I mean these people represent a good three-fourth of the world population don’t they? Isn’t this how we do research these days?!

Looking at a more expert perspective (yes I looked into those as well, I don’t call myself a strategist for nothing eh!) Carl Honore wrote a book on the subject “In Praise of Slow, How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed”. Speed is not always a bad thing I mean some places could really use speed like certain Government Offices that I have come across not pointing fingers or anything (Did I tell you I work in Saudi Arabia?).

But by and large ‘Time Poverty’ – the inability of a large number of people to embrace the present and optimize their experience at that moment has inspired what is known as the ‘Slow Movement’. Even a mock organization – the International Institute of Not Doing Much (IINDM) has been setup to champion this cause. It is a huge philosophy that encompasses many dimensions of our life from Slow Food, Slow Parenting, Slow Travel to Slow Art and beyond!

Being an ad man I guess I notice and look up only when something has implications on branding and advertising. They say advertising is a function of and is inspired by popular culture. It seems “Slow” is becoming the new BIG even in advertising, if not globally then at least in Australia. It’s either that the ‘Slow Movement’ has gained momentum to the point that it is spilling over to brand communications or it’s just some creative guys taking random inspiration. Whatever the case, seeing some commercials inspired by this idea is enough for me to see smoke even when there is no fire. I am sure the flames are not far behind! Check out the videos below to see my pick of ‘Slow Advertising’:

Enjoy the Ride! – YouTube Video Link

Experience Human Flight from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.