Marketing has developed a strange obsession: it wants to be loved. For years, brand love has been treated as one of the ultimate ambitions of marketing. Being known is no longer enough. A brand must create attachment, build a community, trigger emotion and become part of culture – almost as if consumers were expected to form relationships with brands in the same way they do with people.
It is an appealing idea. It gives marketing a romantic dimension. It rewards big creative gestures and produces metrics that are easy to celebrate. But it avoids a much harder question: what is the value of being loved if you are not chosen?
That question feels particularly relevant in the GCC today. Dubai, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have become extraordinary stages for brands. New concepts open constantly. Luxury, beauty, hospitality, fashion and entertainment compete for the same highly connected audiences. The level of ambition is high, the visual standards are high, and so is the pressure to create noise. In that environment, attention can quickly become mistaken for impact.
A consumer can admire a campaign and forget the product. Share a brand’s values and never buy from it. Follow a launch, photograph an activation, send it to friends – and still choose a competitor when the moment of purchase arrives. Affection is not preference. Engagement is not necessarily desire. And visibility is certainly not the same thing as commercial strength.
Yet our industry still has a habit of measuring what flatters its own output. Millions of views become success. Conversation becomes impact. Engagement becomes desirability. Awards become evidence of effectiveness. These indicators can matter, of course. But they are proxies. The popularity of a campaign tells us surprisingly little if consumers cannot connect that memory back to the brand, the product or a reason to choose it.
This is where the industry’s self-love becomes a problem. Marketing can become very good at proving that people noticed the marketing – and much less rigorous at proving what that attention actually built for the client.
The answer is not to reject emotion. Quite the opposite. Great campaigns create memories, associations and desires that can take years to convert into sales. That is one of the reasons brand building matters. Marketing should never be judged only through immediate conversion. But the long-term nature of brand building cannot become an excuse to remove creativity from commercial accountability.
The real objective is not simply to generate emotion. It is to make that emotion accrue to the brand. To make the product more recognisable. The promise more distinctive. The brand easier to recall and easier to choose. A campaign can be beautiful and still be strategically useless if the consumer remembers the celebrity, the location, the soundtrack or the creative execution – but not the brand behind it.
This distinction matters even more in the Gulf because the market is moving at such speed. Brands are entering new categories, international players are expanding, local brands are becoming more sophisticated, and consumers have access to an extraordinary amount of choice. In a market this competitive, simply being visible is not a moat. Being distinctive is.
The next step for marketers in the region should therefore be to become more demanding of creativity, not less creative. Every big idea should answer a few uncomfortable questions. What doe…