L et’s be honest about the word ‘resilience’ because our industry has worn it out. It’s been mentioned in every media statement, every conference panel discussion and every strategy deck since the Iran conflict began six months ago. It is becoming an overused word. However, I do believe the UAE’s approach to this year’s conflict has been genuinely resilient.
Real resilience isn’t about avoiding the hit. It’s an engineering term for what happens after the compression. Resilience comes from the Latin resilire: to spring back.
The UAE’s response since February has been a masterclass in communications best practice. The government has sprung back through a steady stream of honest information instead of retreating into silence, exactly as the term suggests.
A McKinsey study of the 2008-09 downturn had a name for companies that kept investing through the economic crisis: they called them “the resilients”, underlining that silence doesn’t protect a brand during a crisis. Instead, it offers share of voice to whoever stays visible.
Ironically, I believe that women have been practising resilience for generations. Women don’t claim to have a special capacity to withstand more than everyone else. But many women are highly practised at adapting. We learn to read changing circumstances, hold competing priorities in our heads and keep several parts of life moving at once across work and home, with very little separation between the two.
A 2022 study published in the Socius journal found that full-time working mothers experienced smaller increases in stress during the Covid pandemic than women in most other groups. This was not because their lives were lighter, but because juggling competing loads without dropping any of them.
So, what do we learn from this? I believe there are many female role models who can teach us about resilience and how we should apply it across marketing communications.
The first example is Her Excellency Reem Al Hashimy, UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation and CEO of Expo City Dubai Authority. While leading the UAE’s bid to bring Expo 2020 to Dubai, the team was met with a global pandemic that delayed the entire event by a year, but still delivered more than 24 million visitors. Now, as a UAE spokesperson, she’s been one of the calmest, most consistent voices through the Iran conflict, appearing on international media to reaffirm the country’s position with total composure under real pressure.
The learning here is simple. The biggest campaigns rarely go to plan. HE Al Hashimy’s resilience has been defined by adaptability, regardless of the timeline.
In our own work, that means committing to the brand promise. The promise can survive a delay; it cannot survive panic.
Another example is Halima Jumani, CEO of Kibsons, the UAE’s homegrown grocery delivery pioneer. Kibsons could have raised prices while demand surged during the pandemic. However, Kibsons held its prices and absorbed the cost because Jumani believed the business had to prioritise trust and long-term relationships over short-term margins. Her approach teaches us that brand resilience is often invisible during the moment and only obvious in hindsight, when customers reminisce about who protected them and who quietly profited from their fear. In communications, the decision you make during a crisis may be the one that earns you the most loyalty later.
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