This is when Middle East brands will have purpose

Brands have a political power, but in a region with a toxic public sphere, they lose purpose, and meaning.

Symbolic boundaries regulate how we know the world. We make distinctions among groups, people, and objects to establish bonds with some ideas and values and to exclude others. Brands have always occupied a boundary making role. Initially conceived to serve as markers of quality and symbols of ownership, they also function as carriers of distinction and status for their consumers.

In a recent article, communications industry veteran Alex Malouf presents the foundational question: Does anyone have any idea when Middle East brands will have a purpose?

Does anyone have any idea when Middle East brands will have a purpose?

To answer this question carefully, I reflect on the conceptual bases of brands as boundary brokers and boundary makers in light of contemporary middle east and north african politics.

Brands acquire cultural and political authority through their imposition of boundaries. They are inherent devices of legitimation; expressions of faith and portents of desire; they have a vital economic function, managing potential risk; and a heavily symbolic function, assigning reputational qualities to their objects.

Malouf refers to an apparent irony in his article,

The Middle East isn't lacking for issues that the public cares about. We're riven by conflict, and a growing refugee crisis. There's hunger and disease. And let's not forget environmental causes (the Gulf produces approximately a quarter of the world's oil supplies). And then there's gender discrimination.

The very act of branding is political, societies mediate political and cultural authority between different distinct actors through a public sphere.

The public sphere is seen as a domain of social life where public opinion can be formed. The citizen plays the role of a private person who is not acting on behalf of a business or private interests but as one who is dealing with matters of general interest in order to form a public sphere. A public sphere is the basic requirement to mediate between state and society.

The uprisings which surged through the Arab world starting in 2011 did not come from nowhere. They represented in part the manifestation of a long, structural transformation in the region’s public sphere which radically undermined the ability of states to control or shape information. Challenges to authoritarian regimes, on the streets and online, had been growing visibly for over a decade before the region-wide explosion which followed the fall of Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The transforming information environment alone did not cause these uprisings — there are far deeper legacies of authoritarian rule, economic mismanagement, and social frustrations at their root. But the new public sphere helped make these uprisings possible, gave them their distinct characteristics, and in some ways limited their revolutionary potential.

In this context, conscious brands in an unstructured, or missing, public sphere are directly in conflict with the state apparatus. A brand is not only a portal through which we gain understanding of how a product or a service is made to mean. It is a powerful authority, policing and in many cases articulating the boundaries according to which its objects acquire meaning. Branding is not ultimately about expanding the terrain on which meanings can be made; it is about closing off interpretive agency. Branding is a form of boundary making, a creation of limits as a way to exercise cultural power.

Brands in the region that attempt to adopt a purpose, or a unique cultural/political stance risk being prosecuted, or worse, falling flat on a society who has lost the ability to formulate opinion. In a void public sphere, not only brands, but even words lose purpose. Eventually, nothing means anything.

Brand managers need to assess the cultural and political opportunities surrounding their brands, they need to restructure their brands to be relevant at the communal level, in order to become catalysts of empowerment. Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence offer an unprecedented pathway to mainstreaming such mentalities in marketing practices.

Middle Eastern brands do not need to be political to be powerful. They do need, however, to be aware of their politics to attain and preserve their inherently political power.

References:

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