While the region's aggressively expanding telcos must heed the warnings about their respective marketing strategies, the same cannot be said of their branding activities. The recent liberalisation of markets and increased competition has brought the issue of branding to the forefront of the agenda for the Gulf's operators.
Historically, the lack of competition in the region's telecom sector meant that brand strategy wasn't high on the priority list for many mobile providers, with customers almost forced to sign up with monopoly-holding telcos because of a lack of choice.
Today the situation is very different, as operators Gulf-wide spend millions upon millions of dollars tailoring their company's image.
European telcos, however, have been playing the branding game for years. The UK's Vodafone a company that boasts over 100 million customers in 27 countries has reinvented itself several times, while earlier this month France Telecom re-branded its internet and business arms (Wanadoo and Equant respectively) as Orange, the name of its popular consumer mobile brand.
New image
The Gulf's telcos have not ignored these developments, and last month the UAE's incumbent operator Etisalat launched its new and fully re-branded corporate image, to a modern looking and soft-edged green triangle, also dropping the upper-case 'E' from its name, replacing it with a lower-case 'e'.
And in true European style the new etisalat has wasted no time in slapping its new corporate image all over its latest adverts, customer and press material in a bid to draw in new customers and move on with its ambitious global expansion plans.
As with most developments in the region's telco scene, however, Kuwait's MTC was there first. Back in 2002, the company signed a co-branding deal with Vodafone, earning the cache of being associated with one of the biggest and best known telecommunications groups in the world.
With Bahrain's Batelco, Kuwait's Watanyia and Saudi Arabia's Mobily all reportedly considering brand overhauls, the region's telcos could well be 'communicating their unique message' in a very different way for years to come.
