It is about a 15-minute trip from the school of my older son to my in-laws house where I drop him after the school hours on a daily basis. This past week we decided to play a little game, counting how many ads on our daily commute. Between the radio and street ads, we counted 12 ads, one of them in the form of a video on a billboard.

Mostly, those ads were about food and cars, followed by clothes and telecom companies’ offers. Apparently, we are overwhelmed by ads everywhere we go — in the car, in the home, on the Internet. However, the common denominator between them all is this … they are all boring, and I would add the word “irritating” to describe some radio and TV ads.

For a big market in an active economy like the one we have in the Kingdom, the concepts of marketing, of understanding customer behavior seem to be lagging way behind.

Most of the ads produced in the local market are very crude and dull, and usually very direct, either about the price or a new feature of a product. In other words, it is all about the product or the company advertising the product; none of them is appealing to the “why” the customer actually would want to buy the product, what is the perceived value of using it.

It is not very difficult to get to figure out the reasons; local companies are not making any effort to understand why their customers are buying their products as long as they are buying them. They are not seeing any added value in spending more money on trying to understand what their brands mean to their consumers, they are paying enough to produce those dull ads anyway.

Part of the problem is deeply rooted in the culture of this part of the world; the desire to deeply understand, to use scientific approaches to research and answer questions is almost nonexistent in our world.

It is very different when it comes to international brands though; they spend millions of dollars on marketing and consumer behavior researches, they want to understand their customers. For example, one of the most well-known carbonated beverages brands in the world has used neuro-marketing techniques (the field of conducting marketing researches using tools and techniques from the neuroscience in order to study the brain reaction to certain marketing and advertising stimulation) to find out that consumers are associating its brand with family and friend gatherings, with happiness and free times.

That is why in all their recent ads, even the Arabic ones, they are using themes and scenes related to happiness and friends gatherings. I can imagine if such company is ran by the mentality of our region, its management would definitely think that they are so popular to the point that they do not need advertising in the first place, let alone spending money to understand their customers.

I bet that one day they will wake up with the market slipping through their hands because there will always be other players making that extra effort to understand the customer and will end up appealing to their actual needs instead of simply offering the product.

“People are fairly good at expressing what they want, what they like, or even how much they will pay for an item,” says Uma R. Karmarkar to Forbes, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School leading researches in both marketing and neuroscience. “But they aren’t very good at accessing where that value comes from, or how and when it is influenced by factors like store displays or brands. Neuroscience can help us understand those hidden elements of the decision process.”

The bottom line is that marketing as a science seems to be ill understood in this region. It is usually limited to advertising, to answering the question of “who is buying” instead of “why are they buying.”

I believe that it is untapped market in the Kingdom; there is a limited number of Saudi talents working in this multimillion-riyal field, the quality of products in the market are below expectation, the end result is a promising field to be an economical source for the whole country in the form of potential jobs, business opportunities, and partnership with international organizations that are specialized in the modern marketing field.