Stop Proposing to Strangers: The Case for Doing the Basics Well

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Picture this: someone you have never met or spoken to before walks up to you, or worse – DMs you, tells you their salary, mentions that they want three kids, and proposes. Do you accept? 

Of course not. For starters, you may not even be looking to get married right now. And even if you are, you would want to know a little about them first. Enough familiarity to make you want to get to know them better. Then you would put in the time to determine if this person is the right match for you.

Yet brands do this daily. They skip straight to the proposal without courting first. “Here is our list of features. Buy us.”

There seems to be a disconnect between what happens in meeting rooms and what happens in living rooms. 

Some advertising practitioners romanticize the power of advertising, thinking “brand love” can compensate for a subpar product or poor distribution. Others obsess over ROMI and performance dashboards, treating advertising like a vending machine where impressions go in and sales come out. Meanwhile, plenty of people outside our industry seem to either think that advertising has no effect, or that it will get people to buy things they do not need. 

As usual, the truth sits somewhere in the middle. Advertising works in a clear, specific way. It is a gentle nudge, not magical persuasion. If you are not looking for a new car, you are not suddenly going to want one because it has a five-year warranty. And your dream car did not become your dream car because of the installment plan.

Having said that, our relationships with brands are nothing like our human relationships. We buy what we are familiar with and generally feel good about, when we need it, and when it is available. That is it. Loyalty is not going to stop you from picking a different soda if your usual one is not on the menu. Most of us shop from within a repertoire of brands we already recognize and feel okay about. “Brand preference” is a far more accurate and useful description than “brand love”.

So, if the goal is not to build brand love, then what exactly does advertising do? Good advertising has three jobs: First, it needs to get noticed by being different from the rest of the category or the context in which it appears. Second, it needs to be easy to attribute to the correct brand, achieved through the effective use of distinctive brand codes, assuming that these have been well established already. Third, it should evoke an emotional response in the person encountering it. These things build salience, which is what makes the brand come to mind first later on, ideally with a positive association, when someone is finally in the supermarket aisle, shopping a category, and deciding which product to pick up. 

It sounds straightforward, but it is rarely done well. It requires consistency and the confidence to hold steady to a strategy, rather than getting bored and pivoting to whatever looks new and shiny. It also demands resisting the urge to panic at the first hurdle and rush into promotional tactics that deliver marginally incremental gains today at the expense of sustainable growth tomorrow.

In Saudi Arabia, we often hear the blanket statement that this is a price driven market. It is frequently used to justify endless price promotions. But weak pricing power is not a market truth, and the erosion of pricing strength isn’t a solution. It is a consequence of myopic marketing, boardroom pressures, and the resulting reliance on cycles of discounts and sales that push volume while shrinking margins. And although categories in Saudi differ widely in maturity, with FMCG behaving very differently from telecom, banking, automotive, or fashion retail, brands across all of them face the same pressure to chase short-term volume instead of building long-term pricing power.

The good news is that the path to rebuilding pricing power and growing value share reliably is no secret. It starts with acknowledging the need for a reset. It requires clarity on the fundamentals, the discipline to invest in future demand, and the confidence to resist trading long-term strength for short-term volume spikes. And when you do that consistently, while competitors stay trapped in promotion cycles, something predictable happens: you become the brand people already feel familiar with when they are finally “ready to say yes”. In other words: you’ve done the courting, and that’s when more people choose you over the brand shouting proposals on day one. 

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Amr Sallam is Head of Strategy at Results IMC and has spent more than 15 years working in and on the Saudi market. His work focuses on brand strategy, helping organizations move beyond short-term tactics and build demand in ways that reflect how people actually make decisions