Ecommerce Trends: Shipping and Fulfillment

With more shipping boxes on doorsteps, packages on trucks and products in the air than ever before, the global ecommerce sector is booming – and the Middle East is no exception.

According to market trends, more than a quarter of Middle Eastern consumers now shop online every month. 36 percent of shoppers between the ages of 18 and 24 shop online at least once a month, a substantial increase from previous generations.

Better pricing, product selection and convenience are often listed by these customers as the reason for selecting ecommerce over traditional brick and mortar purchases. With increasingly more youth than previously in most Middle Eastern countries, these trends are only expected to continue.

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Coffee and coffee shops are an integral part of Middle East culture, with many claiming that the ancient roots of coffee consumption rest in the Arabic-speaking world. A classical Arabic Abd al-Khadir ode to coffee claims it to be “the beverage of the friends of God.” Enter Starbucks, an utterly American Seattle-based coffee chain with over 600 stores in 12 Middle Eastern and North African countries, with a client base that is growing every day, and surging revenue throughout the region. How has Starbucks blended ancient Arabic culture with modern marketing into a delicious success? And why does the Middle East love the Starbucks brand?
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In this guide, we will give an introduction to the world of the high net worth Arabs and ultra high net worth Arabs. We are concerned with how these individuals have achieved their great wealth, what types of projects, investments, and causes they spend their money on, and what type of foreign investments they are likely to hold or in which they are likely to take interest.

We will briefly analyze the spread of “HNW” (high net worth) Arabs throughout the Middle East (those holding liquid assets worth more than $1 million) and look at how their growth, methods of achieving wealth, and foreign investments differ from those of ultra-high net worth Arabs.. Throughout the article, we will make frequent reference to “UHNW Arabs” (ultra- high net worth Arabs) and “UHNWIs” (ultra-high net worth individuals). Ultra-high net worth individuals are defined as those who hold liquid assets exceeding $30 million. In this article, we will generally exclude from analysis those ultra-high net worth Arabs who hold wealth as government caretakers rather than as individuals – e.g., members of royal families. We will discuss the wealth and spread of UHNWIs in the Middle East, introduce some of the wealthiest individuals in the region, then delve into how they tend to spend their money and how this information could be of use to the marketer. Feel free to skip to sections that most interest you.

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What is Influencer Marketing?

The strategy of influencer marketing uses a personality or celebrity to promote your brand to a larger audience, some well-known examples include Serena Williams for Gatorade and Jennifer Aniston for Emirates Airline. Hiring celebrities as brand ambassadors has been a successful marketing strategy for some time but as social media gains popularity, companies are choosing alternative ambassadors over the significant cost of A-list celebrities.
Across several channels, countless social media profiles have gained loyal followings. With thousands, sometimes millions of viewers, these profiles have significant power and influence, making them an attractive investment for companies looking to increase brand awareness and product sales. This practice is beginning to take off in the Middle East in particular, as social media usage is skyrocketing in the past five years. For the purpose of this article, we will look at YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat and identify what makes these platforms opportunistic as well as looking at specific examples of users who are promoting brands on their accounts.

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According to the Northwest University Qatar estimates in their Media Industries in the Middle East 2016, the total ad market in the Middle East was valued at 5.5 billion USD in 2015. While it only accounted for a small percentage of global ad spend in 2015, the market in the Middle East is ripe with opportunities for marketers to expand their advertising. Though the current market structure differs greatly from that of the global market, or even other underdeveloped markets, the MENA region is seeing a gradual shift into the modern era of digital marketing, an area especially pertinent to the region’s 141 million internet users.

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Arabic magazines both in print and online have continued to pop up over the past 2 decades throughout the Middle East. In this article we will discuss various aspects of Arabic magazine advertising in the MENA region.

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Any marketing copywriter for the past century will tell you that calls to action are essential to getting your target audience to respond to your ads. This is true with the Arabic language as well. If you’re not asking Arabic speakers to take some sort of action in response to your ads you are very unlikely to have success with your marketing campaigns. The problem is a great deal of Arabic marketing done today is often either translated directly from English by translators who don’t properly translate the tense of calls to action or alternatively the ads are written directly by Arab marketers who haven’t studied calls to action and their power to drive marketing results.

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Any market entry plan should include strategy and tactics for reaching your target audience effectively within that region. How a product is marketed in some regions of the world may be very different from how it should be marketed in the Middle East. In this post we will examine some of the unique ways you should be marketing and selling your products to Arabs.

1. Think Tribe & Family with Arabs

Arabs are considered to be collectivists. Collectivists show a high degree of loyalty commitment to their group, family, and tribes. They are committed to their extended family unit and they feel a strong responsibility as a representative of their group. The group as a whole and individually takes responsibility for each member of the tribe.

Marketing Application

When optimizing and designing your website to target collectivist cultures like Arabs you should apply these tactics

• Focus on the community or family in the imagery of the website.
• Honor and respect tradition, status, and cultural maxims.
• Honor those in authority and the elderly

Below are some examples of these principles.

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Ever since Google came out with their Autocomplete feature in their search results in 2008, people have been fascinated the suggested search queries that populate below the search bar as they type. Google is known to use the most common search queries related to keywords you are typing in to auto populate the suggestion box and this is no different in the Arab world. Just by looking at what appears in this box you can quickly get an idea of some of the most common things people are searching for in Google. In this article we explore some of the most common questions Arabs are asking by examining the suggestions that show up in different countries in the Middle East when you start typing in a question like “How do I …” or “What is …” in Arabic. You will probably find many of these quite interesting.

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In this post we compiled what we thought were some of the most well done Arabic commercials in the Middle East. Many of these will be entertaining regardless of whether or not you speak Arabic, but we have also include a description of each advertisement and why we thought it was so great. If you have any examples of Arabic commercials you think should be on this list be sure to let us know.

Panda Cheese

The above Panda cheese commercials are hands down the funniest in this list of Arab country commercials. Each commercial starts with a person refusing or postponing the consumption or the purchase of Panda cheese in a casual way. Next the Panda appears and there is an awkward silence for a few seconds. Then the Panda does something violent in retaliation for the lack of interest in his product. He throws a birthday cake, smashes a car, tips over a shopping cart, breaks a TV, and much more to show everyone “Never say no to Panda”. The reason for the huge success of this commercial is that it literally applies all four of the most power ad campaign techniques into one commercial. There is a word hook, a character hook, a repeatable theme, and a consistent format in each commercial. (more…)

If you are running PPC campaigns in multiple languages its important to know the character limits for each line within your Google Adwords ad to best utilize the ad space provided to you. However, if you wanted to run an Arabic PPC campaign you might be surprised to find that there is a lot of conflicting information on the web about character limits for Arabic ad texts. Many websites that discuss this topic reference information that is out dated or inaccurate. These sites appear to state that your ad title should be 12 characters and each line of the ad text should be just 17 Arabic characters but this isn’t accurate. By doing a search for any product that will bring up Arabic ads within the Middle East region you quickly realize that Arabic advertisement texts are much longer than the limits mentioned above.

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YouTube is exploding with Arab content these days. We wanted to take a look into the most popular comedy channels in the region. We looked at the number of channel views and subscribers to come up with this list of the top ten comedy channels in the MENA region. Three company names kept appearing when we were doing our research on the best Arab comedy on YouTube – Telfaz, Sa7i, and Kharabesh. Each of these production companies has a wide array of online content in Arabic, most of which we weren’t able to explore on this list. What is so amazing for many of these shows is the quality of shows and the production given the fact that many of the shows are on YouTube only. It’s clear that the Middle East is rapidly growing in their ability to create high quality video on a limited budget. (more…)

YouTube has become extremely popular in the Middle East making it a viable channel for reaching large audiences across the region. In this post we will examine the most popular YouTube channels in the Arabic language based off the total number of views each channel has received. It probably goes without saying but it should be noted that since view counts are constantly increasing you will find the view counts larger on each channel mentioned here. (more…)

Have you ever been fascinated with the rise of Arab wealth in the past half century? You’re not alone. In this infographic, IstiZada examines some of the most interesting facts about Arab money and wealth. From some of the top Arab billionaires to the amazing things oil money is doing in Arab countries this infographic has it covered.  The graphic starts with interesting facts about a few of the wealthiest Arabs in the Middle East and then segues into some stunning details about a handful of the most expensive luxury items in the region.  It’s not all glitz and glamor though, as you get halfway through the visual the theme switches to some of the amazing feats Arab wealth is accomplishing. Did you know that the two tallest buildings in the world are in the Arabian Peninsula? That’s right and the infographic outlines that, within a decade, the 3 tallest buildings in the world will be in the Middle East.  From there the infographic gets into ways oil wealth is being used to build a sustainable future by sending hundreds of thousands of Saudi Arabian students abroad for education in places like the United States and England.  To top that off, the graphic concludes with some amazing facts about two sustainability projects in the region. The first is a planned renewable resource project to use sunlight to produce desalinized water for farms in Qatar. The second is a self-sustaining zero emission city in the UAE. (more…)

Online marketing in the Middle East can be extremely rewarding for those who are willing to engage in this rapidly growing region. With many market niches with little to no competition in the region those who invest wisely could see huge returns. Despite this, there are still many mistakes that companies seeking to grow their online presence in the region can make. Some mistakes can decrease a company’s potential return in the region while other mistakes could result in tarnishing a company’s reputation in the region. In this post I will highlight 6 common online marketing mistakes that companies new to the region often make.

1. Forgetting to optimize your website for mobile

Regardless of where you live in the world smart phone usage rates are going up significantly.  Growth in smart phone usage in the Middle East surpasses most regions in the world. In Saudi Arabia for example more than 60% of the population has adopted smartphones. Failing to make your website mobile friendly in both Arabic and English could cost you leads and sales. (more…)