Advertising and marketing: A dilemma for the Yemeni business [Archives:2007/1115/Business & Economy]

YemenTimes Staff
Commonly defined as controlled communications, sending out carefully designed messages to a targeted audience, hoping for a favorable reaction. Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Publicity, Public Relations, and other associated concepts share that common definition, with minor twists in adherence to the nature of business activity and operating environment.

Yemen is an underdeveloped economy with virgin markets, limited competition, and a few business enterprises which take advertising and marketing seriously. However, with regional integration, openness to foreign investments and international competition, and the increasing competition in selected sectors, This is bound to change.

Marketing Specialist Raed A. Moula says that there is a fundamental change in the perception towards advertising in Yemen, from a mere expense to a strategic investment towards manipulating customers. It builds on changing what customers think they need, and in turn redirecting them towards the company's products.

Marketing Strategies in Yemen

Professor of social behavior Dr. Nabil Ali states that the Yemeni consumers are conformists, where they opt to follow the most acceptable consumerism behavior, even if the single consumer does not believe in a particular brand, she will still buy it because it is the best seller. This indicates that market leaders will continue dominating the market for simply because they maintain their image as market leaders.

Al-Waseet advertising newspaper has undertaken a survey to determine the objective of advertising in the press. The results of the survey indicates that only 30 percent of advertising has marketing objectives, while the reminder 70 percent was either to maintain strong links with the media institutions, or to obtain financing for advertising from headquarters – usually located outside Yemen.

Yet, the largest section of advertisers do not advertise for market purposes according to Al-Waseet survey. Explains Raed, stating that there is a corrupt relationship between political newspapers and business enterprises, where business controls what the newspapers publishes in order to avoid having these newspapers publish on corruption of the business or maintain allegiance with the media outlet, using advertising as a way to finance it.

Thabit A. Sallam, an advertising agent in Yemen, indicated that advertising is still underdeveloped in Yemen, were corporations view it as an expensive investment which does not have guaranteed rewards, and do prefer to use advertising funds to subsidize the prices, therefore slightly decreasing the retail price and in turn boosting sales. He added that the price sensitivity of the Yemeni consumers allows companies to manipulate the prices in order to gain market share, a strategy deemed more effective than advertising.

Exposure is another important objective for marketing in Yemen, Rafiq Abdullah, a branch manager, reiterated that a company must always be at the face of the targeted audience, stating that brand exposure results in improved brand recognition and in turn brand popularity. He stated that intensified advertising and promotion will make a brand seem as the market leader, and this is a winning ticket in Yemen.

However, advertising is only one way of marketing in Yemen, as the largest portion of companies rely heavily on direct marketing activities, such as printing brochures, flyers, leaflets, and coupons. Says Yassin Ahmed, a commercial printers manager, “We have selected clients who have periodical promotion campaigns, based mainly on brochures and flyers, this method seems to be gaining on popularity due to the increased demand, so I deem it to be more effective”.

Another popular medium for advertising is billboard signs and outdoor advertising, these have gained in popularity due to the fixed annual expense and the high degree of exposure to traffic. Outdoor advertising has been very successful in Yemen and has taken many forms including giant billboards, small signs on the road, cloth banners, and projected screens. The success of outdoor advertising has been driven mainly by the belief that the on-going traffic is exposed to the sign, however that theory has not been tested.

Given the fact that the largest portion of the Yemeni population reside in rural areas and do not have access to newspapers and print materials, most fast moving consumer goods manufacturers still rely on TV advertising and Radio broadcasts. The popularity of these two mediums have increased with the recent emergence of a new television channel in Yemen, Al-Saeeda, and the ability to use local radio stations in advertising different messages to different locations. The success of this method of advertising have even started spreading to non-fast moving consumer goods to luxury items such as mobile phones, where advertising messages for the phones now specify the model specifications, the price, and the location where it could be bought from. This method in advertising also have a measureable impact which encourages business to undertake such advertising.

The Future of Advertising

The Media landscape in Yemen has changed rapidly over the last decade, first with the emergence of specialized media such as family and women magazines, business publications, and others focusing on Telecommunications, Information Technology, Automotive, and Travel. These local publications have encouraged advertisers as it targets specialized audience.

Another phenomena is the emergence of online advertising, with the boom in online news websites and aggregators such as Yemenportal.net, attracting over three thousand unique visitors every day, exposure through these websites have become guaranteed, even other websites which attract reasonable amounts of traffic and visitors started to attract advertisers as well. Therefore it is expected that interactive advertising online would be equally rewarding and lucrative for advertisers as well for the media, given the unique attributes of online advertising and the flexibility it gives for crafting the message.
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