Mohammad Aljuhani, Associate Director – Marketing and Communications.One of the hardest and saddest things about marketing today is that everything can look perfect while achieving nothing. Some marketing teams operate with clear calendars. The content goes out on schedule, the events are neatly covered, and the numbers in the reports are green. They are busy and their work looks perfect, but they deliver limited business value that does not offset the cost; the cost of looking fine.
When did the marketing role become about looking good rather than shaping decisions and driving business growth? We have traded our seat at the strategy table for a front-row seat at the photo shoot. ‘Busy’ has become the ultimate vanity metric.
I have personally seen processes stretch across 40 business days for an evergreen social media post. It is a black hole of senior hours sacrificed for genuine craft without a hint of return on investment (ROI). Nobody asked if it was cost-effective and if the time of these senior professionals yielded business value in return. No, nobody was expected to.
The problem becomes worse when the organisation does not see the problem. From the outside and from the inside, everything looks fine. But looking fine and performing are two different things. When marketing is measured through how things look rather than the value they create, our focus shifts from what is impactful to what is visible.
A campaign becomes a film, a strategy becomes a communications plan, and a marketing department becomes a very expensive production house. A brief arrives and the immediate question is: what are we producing?
If we look across the industry in our market, we find that this is a pattern. Some big campaigns with large budgets are often beautiful and even artistic but make little business sense. We, as marketers, amplify the problem. The way we consume ads is different from the average consumer. We live and breathe the craft and our brands; the customer does not. Judging the quality of the work based on what we hear from our industry peers is often misleading. So where do we go from here? We turn to data – and the way we leverage data has introduced another problem.
The wealth of data in the digital era has shifted our focus from the big picture to trying to perfect the numbers. Data has stopped being a compass that we use to make informed decisions. It has become the decision-maker – a shield we use to avoid making a decision. We benchmark to replicate what worked for others. When data is used to diffuse accountability rather than drive it, you end up with safe campaigns built by committees and designed for the approvers, not the target audience.
We should value professionals who challenge the brief, question the metrics and push for bolder approaches. We should treat these professionals as assets, not risks. If we build teams that make no mistakes, we end up with teams that are optimised for political survival where the compliant gets promoted and the competent gets managed.
Each of these on its own is a problem. Together they build a hollow marketing function – one that gets called upon when a polish is needed but is never part of the real business and its growth. This becomes a much bigger issue in our market.
The Saudi market is hosting the next World Expo in 2030 and the FIFA World Cup in 2034. Our giga and mega projects involve building cities from scratch. The market is competing for global and local talent, investment and attention simultaneously. The organisations behind these ambitions are spending at a scale the region has never seen, and they are doing it in front of an audience that has seen everything.
A campaign that impresses internally will not necessarily impress an investor, a mainstream media outlet or a target audience that has been marketed to by the best in the world. When the stakes are this high, the cost of a marketing function that was built to beautify rather than lead is a missed opportunity at a critical moment.
We need to stop treating data as the ultimate truth. Data does not always capture long-term impact. Human behaviour is more complex than what organisations report in surveys or what interviews suggest, especially when they are in market.
The cities are rising and the world is coming. The cost of a marketing function that only knows how to look good in these moments is a strategic failure.
By Mohammad Aljuhani, Associate Director – Marketing and Communications
