The Blue Parrot Club

In the movie classic Casablanca Rick’s Place is the flashy bistro owned by Humphrey Bogart where all the European exiles cool their heels. In the Arab quarter Sydney Greenstreet runs the Blue Parrot, a seedy dive catering to local clientele. A long time ago some friends of mine – old Middle East hands – set up an imaginary society they called The Blue Parrot Club. Anyone who would rather be in the Blue Parrot than Rick’s Place is automatically a member. The reason I mention this is that I think those of us who live and work in the Middle East as marketing communications professionals need to spend more time in the Blue Parrot and less in Rick’s Place. We need to get much closer to the people and cultures we’re supposed to be reaching.

Imagine a group of Chinese writers and marketing guys from Beijing, who don’t speak any language but Mandarin and pidgin English with no experience of British culture, setting up a PR agency in Belfast where they spend all their time hanging out with other members of the Chinese community, not mixing too much with the locals, who don’t want to mix with them anyway. And the PR agency they’ve set up actually aims to implement communications programs in Southern England. Sound bizarre? Well, this is the way the Middle East PR industry has been operating for over a decade. Dubai is, for many very good reasons, the communications hub of the Middle East, not least of which is its openness and cosmopolitan tolerance of Western culture, but there’s a danger that those of us operating out of Dubai assume that working here prepares us to communicate with the surrounding region. How can we communicate with markets we don’t understand or relate to?

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard advertising, public relations and marketing practitioners working in Dubai express fear and loathing at the prospect of working in Egypt, Iran, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia. These are major markets in the region with tremendous wealth and huge populations. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia alone comprises 70% of the regional economy, has the Gulf’s largest, youngest and fastest-growing population, and is almost invariably the prime target for multinational enterprises. Of course these can be intimidating and exasperating markets to work in, with local customs, prejudices, sensibilities and laws we may not understand or agree with but how can we even begin to plan communications programs directed at the people in these places if we remain reluctant, frustrated outsiders?

‘You bring an expert in communications from England or China or Malaysia to an Arab country and he’s no longer an expert,’ said my colleague Zahra’a Taher, a Bahraini national and managing partner of Bahrain’s leading event management company, T&M Events Com. She has a point. No matter how many communications skills we have, if we don’t understand the language, culture, religion and sensibilities of a place and its people with some degree of intimacy we’re not going to be able to communicate fluently.

I think that the secret to communicating in the Middle East is nothing less than to fall in love with the place and the people. What I mean by this is that we have to be captivated. We have to be committed. We have to be compassionate. We have to care.

When we travel to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Iran, how many of us venture outside our hotels and conference rooms to get to know the people on their own turf? I’m not just talking about dinners with clients and colleagues or sitting in on focus groups. I’m talking about interacting with ordinary people. Seeing how they live, sharing their dreams and frustrations, getting under the skin of the country.

This may seem like a tall order but there is a way to gain that kind of access and it is by reaching out to young people. By transferring skills and nurturing talent we can win their trust and gain access, insight and understanding that will nourish our work while building a truly local communications industry. A genuine commitment to capacity-building could have a terrific impact on everything from alleviating our own security concerns, to optimizing our use of media, to sending global brand-building messages and rolling out programs that hit the mark. If we truly want to communicate with Middle East markets we have to be passionately involved, invest in the people, stay away from Rick’s Place and join The Blue Parrot Club.