The Arab World Unbound: Tapping into the Power of 350 Million Consumers by Vijay Mahajan

Author:Vijay Mahajan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-07-12T14:00:00+00:00

Arab Women as Head of the Household

As a growing number of Arab women have become more educated and self-sufficient, they've also solidified their authority within the home. The most successful consumer companies in the region have crafted campaigns that tap into a wife and mother's role as protector of her family's well-being and happiness.

Promoting Healthy Diets

When Goody started thinking about ways to increase consumption of its peanut butter in Saudi Arabia, it recognized that mothers cared about and controlled their families' diets. I never would have guessed it when I visited Goody's offices in June 2010, but Saudis enjoy their peanut butter. About nine of every ten consumers in the company's target markets said they kept a jar of peanut butter in the house, according to Waqas Moosa, the company's marketing director.

Getting enough Saudis to purchase peanut butter wasn't a problem for Goody, which controlled about two-thirds of the Saudi peanut butter market at the time. The problem was getting them to eat it more often. Jars of peanut butter would sit in the pantry for months, opened once every couple of weeks for a taste. While the average person in the United States consumes about 1.4 kilograms of peanut butter a year, Moosa told me, the average Saudi consumes about a tenth of that amount. Goody had to boost consumption.

Research showed that heavy peanut butter users ate peanut butter along with something else, usually honey or jam. So Goody ratcheted up a marketing campaign called, “How would you like it?”—asked along the lines of the oft-uttered question, “How would you like your tea?”—and offered samples of peanut butter with honey or jam. Sales jumped, but Moosa and his colleagues realized it would work only as a short-term fix. Over the long haul, they'd have to reach Saudi kids, the main consumers of peanut butter in the country. And if they wanted to get kids to eat more of it, they would have to go through the gatekeeper mothers.

Like mothers anywhere, Saudi women want to keep their kids healthy. For most adults, peanut butter packs too many calories and too much fat. But for active, growing kids, it's a good source of protein and vitamin B3. So Goody started a longer-term marketing campaign in 2007 that promoted the health benefits of peanut butter. Moosa showed me a clever television commercial that helped make the point. In it, a mother serves her young son a peanut butter and honey sandwich, telling him it will make him a hero. The boy's dreams of heroism take him to the soccer field, where he confounds a pair of schoolyard bullies, shows off his skills, and becomes the darling of his classmates. Translated, the voice-over tells mothers that peanut butter will make their children active, smart, and strong.

The campaign has started to shift perceptions, Moosa said, enough that it later spawned a similar campaign, Health and Breakfast. “We wanted to focus on the mother,” Moosa told me. “In this culture, the mother is definitely very interested in taking care of her family.

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