Blog
Do you like Egyptian food?
A few weeks ago I was driving down Sheikh Zayed Road in the afternoon and passed by a large Egyptian restaurant in one of the new highway adjacent retail buildings that have become popular with F&B joints. When I looked at this restaurant I couldn't believe the...
Is it too late to create a brand strategy?
Being an entrepreneur is exciting. When an idea is planted in your mind it can take hold and grow to the point where there is no room left for any other thoughts. At that point, many people just leap into starting a new business without necessarily putting all the...
The Power of the Pivot
Launching a business or new product is such a personal thing. Months and sometimes years of quiet planning, endless working, and continuous praying go into bringing something new to market. Along the way, most founders begin to intertwine their own personal sense of...
Why Your Brand is Not Yours to Control
A few weeks ago, we launched our first ever Spark Series event (#ICoSS) titled How to Build a Brand That Builds Your Business. When I took the stage I looked out at the audience and declared, "if there is one thing I want you to remember from today, it is that your...
Being Unique is a Myth
For years I held the belief that for a business to truly have a strong brand they must have a "unique selling proposition" (USP). It was what I was taught again and again at university, and it was a theory that I carried with me throughout the last decade of my...
Spark Series: Inspiring the UAE’s SMEs
On September 26, 2017 we launched our Spark Series, which is an event series aimed at helping SMEs harness the power of marketing. These events will focus on educating SME business owners about different aspects of massive marketing world and how they can be applied...
Spark Series: How to Build a Brand That Builds Your Business
https://youtu.be/RyHu3PfDYVg UPDATE: All general admission tickets have been booked! If you would still like to attend, please email us on hello@itaniandcompany.com with the following information and we'll try to squeeze you in: 1) Full name 2) Company 3) Role...
How do I win back lost customers?
https://youtu.be/owoAMJdh8yw Customer retention management is a tricky thing. Many businesses focus obsessively on bringing in new customers and forget about their existent ones. Because of this, they often lose the clientele they've already worked hard to gain...
Can a brand change its image? Union Coop certainly did.
https://youtu.be/y0gKWyVotEc When I first moved to the UAE in 2007 I worked for Transmed, the official distributor for Procter & Gamble in the country. As an account executive, I was responsible for selling and maintaining a certain portion of the portfolio to my...
Popular Sales Promotions & What They Achieve
https://youtu.be/cyiip6TmHu0 If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen my InstaStory confession over the weekend about my love for the supermarket. Every week, I look forward to my Saturday morning shop just so I can peruse the shelves and see what has been...
Back to Basics: The 7 P’s of Marketing
https://youtu.be/g0dPXrDWXlg Marketing can be quite a complex discipline that overwhelms many business owners. Whenever I find people struggling to understand what marketing really encompasses, I always direct them to the E. Jerome McArthy's 4 P's rule of thumb, which...
![Marketing Mondays: What is Brand Co-Creation? [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Taco-Bell.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: What is Brand Co-Creation? [VIDEO]
https://youtu.be/1k9wn74k4Ns "The problem with a complete [brand] story is that the audience plays no role in it." - Tamsen Webster. When I heard this quote on the On Brand podcast, it struck me in the gut and made me pause the episode to think. How often do companies...
![Marketing Mondays: Promote & Discount without Damaging Your Brand [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Solde_discount-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: Promote & Discount without Damaging Your Brand [VIDEO]
https://youtu.be/ijye_nfba7g Promotion. A sticky point for all business owners. They offer a quick way to drive traffic to a business, but the trade off is questionable. Was it profitable? Are the new customers that you acquired going to be repeat customers? And the...
![Marketing Mondays: Is “Influencer” Really a Dirty Word? [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/brooke-cagle-157923-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: Is “Influencer” Really a Dirty Word? [VIDEO]
https://youtu.be/FwZEx8mxYuA "Influencer" has become the most polarizing term in marketing over the last few years. Companies in the region are still clamoring over each other trying to figure out what influencer marketing is and how not to miss out on this supposed...
![Marketing Mondays: 3 Questions for the Perfect Presentation [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/benjamin-child-17946-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: 3 Questions for the Perfect Presentation [VIDEO]
https://youtu.be/wrviHyoDfOk As a marketer who spent much of her career working with multinationals, I have drafted more presentations than I can count. Over the years, I have worked on thousands of slides to build cases, present successes, and persuade...
![Marketing Mondays: When is brand image not enough? [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/corinne-kutz-211251-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: When is brand image not enough? [VIDEO]
https://youtu.be/Hc-jalCjA3s I went through a pretty big breakup recently. We were together for 5 years, and while on the outside our relationship looked great, I’d been miserable for the last year. In fact the entire relationship had never really lived up to my...
Itani & Co. Featured on HuffPost!
It's not a regular occurrence to start our mornings featured on The Huffington Post, so it was a lovely surprise to see an article by our Principal Consultant Maya up on their site this morning. Maya discusses how avoiding our weaker professional skills can be a...
![Marketing Mondays: Prioritizing your marketing activity [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/jason-chen-54975-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: Prioritizing your marketing activity [VIDEO]
The following article is an expansion on the below #ICoMM video about prioritizing your marketing activity according to your budget. https://youtu.be/n6h1GMKxAz0 One of the most common misconceptions about marketing is that it is a glamorous discipline. While aspects...
![Marketing Mondays: Be a Purple Cow to Beat Your Competition [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cow-759018_1280-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: Be a Purple Cow to Beat Your Competition [VIDEO]
Note: This article is an expansion on the below Marketing Monday (#ICoMM) video regarding Seth Godin's concept of the Purple Cow and how businesses can shine among their competition. https://youtu.be/SNZXEzpzNMQ What color is a cow? Black and white is the general...
![Marketing Mondays: Branding vs. Marketing [VIDEO]](https://www.itaniandcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/igor-ovsyannykov-223089-1080x675.jpg)
Marketing Mondays: Branding vs. Marketing [VIDEO]
Note: The below blog post is an elaboration on this week's episode of I&Co.'s Marketing Mondays (#ICoMM), a new weekly series we have launched on YouTube and our blog. #ICoMM will tackle topics that business owners face on a regular basis, and we are happy to...
Can salt be remarkable?
How do you make a commodity product like salt stand out from the crowd?
Garbage in, garbage out: the importance of the creative brief
Briefs. They're some of the most time consuming, tedious documents to put together during a creative project, but they are also the most important. Whether you're launching a large scale website overhaul or developing a one off newspaper advertisement, the brief to...
‘Tis the Season to Be Tactful
With Eid Al Fitr just around the corner, you can expect a barrage of greetings from brands that subtly (and not so subtly) want to promote their products/services on the occasion. Seasonal advertising may seem simple, but so many brands have no clue how to do it with...
Big project wrap up!
Hey Sparkers! It's been a MANIC few months with my consultation clients hence the minimal blogging - sorry! Hopefully over the quieter summer months I will have more time to pick up the pace on the blogging side. I just wrapped up a big project with one of the...
3 Lessons Brands Can Learn from the Chewbacca Mom
What can brands learn from the overnight internet star?
The priceless benefit of being someone’s “guy”
Panky is my "guy". My jewellery guy, that is. 5 years ago my friend referred me and my now husband to Monili Jewellers as a reliable place to purchase our wedding jewellery. In the lead up to our big day we had a variety of pieces custom made with them and...
Early Adopters and Juicy Couture Tracksuits
Bedazzled Juicy Couture tracksuits evoke a physical reaction from me. I apologize for saying that to those of you who still wear them. I can't help it. The cringe is automatic. Juice Couture tracksuits were all the rage in the early noughties. I didn't even like them...
ATL, BTL, OTL – what’s with all the abbreviations?
Marketers use a lot of abbreviations and terms which sound like mumbo jumbo to outsiders. So here’s a quick overview of three of those terms!
Quote of the Week | March 13, 2016
What is the Opposite of Remarkable?
I've been reading The Purple Cow by Seth Godin (well, listening to it - podcasts and audio books save me on my commutes to work), which is a book centered around the belief that the only way to be noticed in today's cluttered advertising landscape is to have a...