When I first landed in the UAE in 2000, a veteran expat friend of mine told me that Dubai is built on sand and a lot of public relations. Perfect, I thought, for I had finally found my own kind of Eldorado.
What I was about to witness in the ensuing years was nothing short of a miracle — and a prolific PR career — as the frantic pace of development unfolded in front of my very eyes.
Fuelled by a construction frenzy of iconic property developments, the real estate boom grabbed media headlines and prime air time at media outlets across the world capturing the attention of international investors seeking a place on the ultra-luxurious sun-kissed beaches, sun-seeker yachts and sand-reclaimed islands.
And as the government and developers kept coming up with a new ‘global-first’, or ‘world’s biggest’ concept almost every month, PR consultants hardly had time to breathe. And they were in no need of any head scratching to help them come up with their next headline-grabbing press release, key message or talking points for their clients.
It was all done almost on auto-pilot... that is until the economic slowdown came to stall growth making our crisis management skills a coveted commodity that helped mitigate the risk and minimise the impact on Dubai’s global reputation.
But as Dubai emerged virtually unscathed from the depths of the global financial meltdown, it quickly became clear that relying on real estate for reputation-enhancing global headlines had become as unrealistic an expectation as some of the Cityscape projects that never saw the day of light.
This is when the Dubai Government succeeded yet again in creating a new narrative that added much new PR mileage as the Dubai Expo 2020 Candidate City logo turned into Dubai Expo 2020 Host City.
There is no doubt in my mind that Expo 2020 is going to contribute plenty in Dubai’s strategic goals and Plan 2021, which aspires to create a smart and sustainable city where happy people live in an inclusive society. Yet, Dubai hosting Expo 2020 is not a global story, Dubai hosting the Olympics or sponsoring the Fifa World Cup would be.
That’s why I feel that Dubai already needs to identify a new narrative, especially for global consumption purposes.
To put this into context, let’s assume that Dubai is a company and its residents are its employees. Expo 2020 weaves well with Dubai Plan 2021 giving the employer great internal communications content to help workers remain engaged and committed.
However, this narrative is simply not relevant for international audiences and fails to inspire or captivate the imagination of non-residents because it simply can’t answer the ‘what’s in it for me’ question of European, American or Chinese citizens. Hence the need to diversify the narrative, something which governments do all the time.
Domestic audiences need to hear certain things that are not necessarily relevant or interesting to consumers of information residing elsewhere.
What Dubai’s PR machine must do is to balance relevance and engagement at home while creating fresh, engaging and always-on content that is disconnected from any multi-billion dirham governmental initiative or philanthropic handout while consistently promoting Dubai’s brand, purpose and personality worldwide.
To achieve this, Dubai needs its own centralised global content programme, a unified framework comprising an array of content marketing assets which talk to each other. These need to be strategically aligned between themselves and by the same vision while serving a core purpose.
This programme should be backed by an international network of selected hubs that would drive the localisation process across regions to fine tune this content according to market-specific norms and requirements.
For instance, a well-designed thought leadership strategy that is bespoke and relevant to key markets internationally would help Dubai reinforce its credentials as the region’s top FDI destination. This would lure more multinationals to set up their Middle East hubs on or off our shores while reinforcing the city’s ambitions to become an instantly recognisable global financial centre.
By the same token, a creatively executed talent brand campaign would also help Dubai talk about its Knowledge Economy aspirations to international audiences and attracting the brightest minds in the same way as travellers and tourists would by destination marketing that speaks to their hearts and minds.
Scratching the surface is no longer enough and no one really believes in fairy tales. It is about time we dug deeper into Dubai’s real essence to discover and extract the substance of its very being and refine it into a brand new, compelling and meaningful story that we tell with a renewed passion and reimagined ethos.
The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at Al-Futtaim and author of “Back to the Future of Marketing – PRovolve or Perish”. Follow him on Twitter @georgekotsolios
