Ghada Ismail
In the final part of our interview, Abu Zannad turns to Saudi startups with international ambitions and closes with the one piece of advertising history he’d want every founder to know before they spend their first marketing riyal.
As Saudi startups look to expand internationally, how important is it to adapt their brand and messaging to different markets without losing their original identity?
“I think the wrong question for a Saudi startup is: “How much of our Saudi identity should we keep when we go abroad?”
The more useful question is: “What did being built in Saudi Arabia teach us that could make us more valuable somewhere else?”
Because origin by itself is not a strategy. It is raw material for a strategy.
And I think Saudi startups should be increasingly confident about this. The ecosystem has changed enormously. Saudi Arabia recorded $1.72 billion in venture-capital investment across 257 deals in 2025, the highest levels the market has seen. We are no longer only asking whether globally competitive startups can be created in Saudi Arabia. Increasingly, we are asking which of them can travel.
But travelling does not mean becoming culturally anonymous. The strongest global brands rarely erase where they came from. They understand what should travel intact and what needs to be translated.
I would ask a Saudi founder to think about four things.
First:
What is your Saudi core?
Not the flag. Not Arabic typography. Not putting a palm tree into the identity.
What capability, insight or sensibility did growing up inside this market actually give you?
Maybe you learned to design technology for Arabic-speaking consumers rather than adapting English technology afterwards. Maybe you became unusually good at operating in regulated and fragmented environments. Maybe your understanding of hospitality produced a different service standard. Maybe you grew up around a culture of family commerce and understood social selling differently. Maybe rapid transformation in the Kingdom taught your company to operate at a pace and scale that companies from more settled markets are not accustomed to. Maybe there is something in Saudi food, design, beauty, gaming, tourism, fintech or culture that the rest of the world has not encountered in this form before.
But the discipline is important:
Don’t ask what is Saudi about us. Ask 1-what is uniquely Saudi about us that is useful to somebody else.
Unifonic is an interesting example. It began in Saudi Arabia solving the difficult reality of reliable communications in fragmented, regulated markets and across Arabic language environments. Today it describes cultural fluency, trust and AI-native customer experience as part of its proposition. Something learned locally became a capability that could travel.
Foodics is another Saudi-born company that took its restaurant technology beyond the Kingdom into markets including the UAE and Egypt. The transferable asset was not “Saudi-ness” as decoration. It was a solution developed inside a sophisticated regional F&B environment that was relevant to restaurant operators elsewhere.
That brings me to the second question: 2-What are the qualifying factors in the market you are entering?
Strategists sometimes call these points of parity.
These are the things you have to get right simply to be taken seriously. If I enter Germany, Singapore, the UAE or Britain, what does the category expect? What is the regulatory standard? What does good customer service mean? What payment behaviour exists? What is the expected delivery time? What does trust look like? Which features are simply assumed? What tone belongs on the platform? What does the audience consider credible?
These are not necessarily reasons someone will choose you. They are the price of admission. A Saudi fintech company cannot enter another market saying, “We are proudly Saudi,” while failing to understand its financial regulation. A consumer startup cannot insist that its Saudi customer journey must be reproduced exactly in London.
Identity is not an excuse for irrelevance. You earn the right to be different only after you have demonstrated that you belong in the category.
Then comes the third question: 3-What are your winning factors?
These are your points of difference. Once I believe you can perform the basic job as well as the alternatives, why should I choose you? This is where Saudi origin can become strategically interesting. What can you offer that the incumbent cannot easily copy? A product insight? A technology? A cultural understanding? A design sensibility? A service model? A community? A particular form of hospitality? Access to a new cultural world? A way of solving complexity that your home market forced you to learn?
So I would separate very clearly:
Qualifying factors get you into the consideration set.
Winning factors give people a reason to choose you.
And both have to be understood at several levels: the market, the category, the audience, and increasingly, the platform.
Something that makes you distinctive on TikTok may be irrelevant in enterprise sales. Something that wins in Saudi food culture may need a different cultural translation in Paris. Something that works in B2C may signal the wrong things entirely in B2B.
So the identity stays coherent. The expression adapts.
This is where I think the national Saudi Made brand offers a very useful lesson. The program was deliberately created as a unified identity for Saudi products and services in domestic and international markets, and from the beginning it has been associated with quality, competitiveness, credibility and excellence. More recently that architecture has expanded: there is a Saudi Tech label supporting technology companies abroad, while the Saudi Crafts identity has been explicitly built around creativity, authenticity and quality presented in a contemporary way.
I find that combination interesting.
Quality and innovation on one side.
Authenticity and cultural confidence on the other.
Saudi Arabia does not have to choose between heritage and modernity. In many ways, the interesting story of Saudi Arabia today is precisely the tension between the two. That is something Saudi startups can borrow from; not necessarily the Saudi Made logo itself, because that has eligibility requirements, but the larger idea of what Saudi provenance can begin to mean.
A Saudi startup going abroad should ask:
4-What does “from Saudi Arabia” add to this particular proposition?
Sometimes the answer may be heritage. Sometimes technology. Sometimes design. Sometimes hospitality. Sometimes ambition. Sometimes the credibility of having solved a difficult problem in one of the world’s fastest-transforming economies. And sometimes, frankly, Saudi origin may add nothing relevant to the customer’s decision. Then don’t force it.
Because the objective is not to make every international customer admire where you come from. The objective is to give them a compelling reason to choose what you built. That is why I would never tell Saudi founders simply to “localize.” Localization can become another superficial exercise: change the language, hire a local influencer, swap some images and call the job finished.
I prefer the word trans-creation.
Trans-creation asks a much harder question:
5-How can the same meaning survive in a different cultural grammar?
This is actually one of the larger ideas behind AdEntity. Cultures have always survived contact not by remaining untouched, but by absorbing and translating what comes from outside while retaining enough coherence to remain recognizable.
Brands are not very different. The identity should have a centre. The expression should have flexibility. So if I had to give Saudi startups one framework for international expansion, it would be:
Know what is non-negotiably yours.
Learn what is non-negotiably theirs.
Meet the qualifying factors.
Protect the winning factors.
Then translate the expression for the market, category, audience and platform.
Don’t export the Saudi advertisement. Export the Saudi advantage. And perhaps the strongest global Saudi brands of the future will not be the ones that become less Saudi as they travel. They will be the ones that discover which part of being Saudi the world finds valuable.”
If you were advising a founder launching a startup today, what is one lesson from the history of advertising that you would want them to understand before spending their first marketing budget?
“My first advice? Please refer to my previous six answers. But if I had to reduce 100 years of advertising history to one lesson, it would be this:
Media amplifies.
It does not create meaning.
If you haven’t understood the human, the culture, the category, the product truth, and why anybody should care, spending more money will not solve the problem. Today, AI can simply help you waste that money faster.
So before buying attention, build something worth paying attention to. Then amplify the hell out of it.”