JEDDAH, 16 March 2004 — Social responsibility was the theme of a session on branding at Advista Arabia VI here yesterday.
“As opinion leaders and responsible media, we have the responsibility to build not only our business but our society as well,” said Hani Khoja, marketing director, paper and food category, Proctor & Gamble Arabian Peninsula, on the third day of the event at Jeddah Hilton.
“It’s not always that I can build my business and build my community as a hobby. In fact, building business and community together is a bigger business,” he said.
Social responsibility is particularly important in this part of the world, Khoja emphasized. “Our responsibility could extend to helping orphans, helping widows, helping the needy and helping our own environment.” The image of a brand should also carry an element of social responsibility. Thus negative images of Arabs in the Western media could be countered by being seen to support charity or offering free health care “You have to offer these free and earn their respect,” he said.
Alfred Ries of Ries & Ries Consulting said Saudi Arabia had enormous potential to develop worldwide brands. It could be “another kind of oil boom and a different kind of diversification,” he told Arab News.
“I think potentially, people in the Kingdom and the rest of the Arab world should think about building global brands,” said Ries who gave a presentation on “Building a Brand in a Media-Saturated World.”
In terms of branding, the Kingdom was “pretty much a clean sheet of paper,” he said. “You can start afresh. The next step for the Kingdom is to take some Saudi brands to global levels.
The future belongs to the global brands; you cannot just be successful in the Kingdom. You’ve got to be successful around the world.”
According to Ries, simple ideas make powerful brands. “If you want to build a powerful brand then you have to stand for a single, unique, different idea and put that idea in the mind. And the only way to do that is with the important combination of publicity, PR and advertising.”
Tony Rhodes, Middle East managing director of Synovate, said marketers generally agreed that a strong consumer relationship with a brand was a key element of a brand’s market equity. He focused his presentation on the issue of brand equity and argued.
“It’s important to identify not just those consumers who already have a strong relationship with a brand, but also those who are willing and able to give you more business in future.”
Simon Woodroffe, founder and owner of Yo! Sushi, gave a presentation on “Branding Is What You Do to Cows.” He said when he started his chain of Japanese-style restaurants he tried to make Japan more accessible to the West in many ways. “I used to call Japan the last great secret of the Orient. Today, the world of Islam is one of the last great secrets of the world. It’s something we don’t really grasp or understand in the West,” he said.
