Writing
The essays, in full. One argument each, in English and Arabic.
Founder · Building Marketing Department
Marketing that cannot be measured is decoration.
Redha Alayesh, marketing consultant, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I build marketing departments for companies here and across the Gulf, and I write about why most of them are built to underperform.
- 40+
- Marketing departments worked with
- 3
- Companies I built and closed
- $300K+
- Of my own money lost
Is this you
I get called at one of four moments.
- The head of marketing left, and the budget is still sitting there.
- You raised on a growth number you are now going to miss in public.
- You are paying for marketing every month and cannot name one thing it moved.
- You are the founder, and you are also the marketing department.
None of those is a campaign problem. All four are the same problem wearing different clothes: there is a number, and there is no name beside it. Or worse, there is no number anybody is measuring at all.
The premise
Three things I keep finding in companies certain their marketing is broken.
The budget is not the bottleneck.
A company that spends 2M SAR a year and cannot attribute one of them is not underfunded. It is unaccountable. More money into an unmeasured system buys more unmeasured system.
"Brand awareness" is where accountability goes to die.
If a number cannot be missed, nobody owns it. If nobody owns it, it is not a goal. It is a mood. Ask who gets called into a room when awareness falls, and listen to the silence.
A department is a structure, not a headcount.
Hire a marketing manager into an undefined role and you have not built a department. You have bought an expensive person who takes requests.
Ways in
Four ways in.
Second Opinion
One marketing decision, taken apart, every second Sunday.
YouTube
Marketing breakdowns, in Arabic.
BMD
The consulting work, the framework, and the assessment.
One marketing decision, taken apart, every second Sunday.
No roundups, no news. One decision a marketing leader actually has to make, reasoned through the way I would reason through it: the numbers I would ask for, the verdict I would give, and where I might be wrong.
Free. Every second Sunday. What you get, and what happens to your address.
The practice
BMD works on the marketing function inside Saudi and GCC companies, some of them from the ground up. Alyaseen Agri, Ithra, IBM, the Saudi Esports Federation, Withgrowth, Riyadh Combat Club. If you want the method rather than the argument, it lives there: buildingyourmarketingdepartment.com
Your marketing is already being measured. By whoever writes the budget.