J. Walter Thompson MEA is set to release its 10 Trends for MENA 2015 report in September.
With the release date looming, Tarek Haddad, J. Walter Thompson Beirut‘s Business Development Director, touches on one of the ten trends featured in the report: Bil Arabi.
The executive summary of the report, released earlier this year, says of the Bil Arabi trend: “We’ve entered an era where Arabic has officially regained its ‘cool’ factor. New language systems, words and methods of communication are emerging, as people hunger for content in their mother tongue; visual and aural denotations of cultural relevance that can only be polished off in Arabic.”
Here’s what Haddad had to say.
Not so long ago in the Middle East and North Africa region, English was considered a status symbol that immediately set the speaker above all others, through notions of worldliness and knowledge. Yet this ‘Western’ appearance did not actually make you ‘worldly’ and certainly did nothing to aid connectivity to ones’ own culture and heritage.
Today, whilst having their finger firmly on the international pulse, the Arab consumer is now celebrating their knowledge and cultural richness in a way that was almost unimaginable a few years ago. Through a better and more defined command of the Arabic language, nuances of each Arab state are coming increasingly to the fore.
The upshot is, we’ve entered an era where Arabic has officially regained its ‘cool’ factor. We saw this trend beginning in 2013 we identified the rise of ‘Authentically Arab’ – a major shift that encapsulated products or services tailor made for the Arab world.
So imagine an Arab consumer’s disappointment when – despite conversing in the world’s 5th most spoken language, which is also the fastest growing language on the internet – his native tongue still lags behind in terms of available online content. And lagging in both quality as well as quantity.
Little surprise therefore that 65% of residents in Arab countries began demanding more content that is relevant to them, both linguistically and culturally.
Today, we are seeing the evolution of great Arabic content being made available, meeting people’s hunger for stories arising in their mother tongue; visual and aural denotations of cultural relevance that can only be polished off ‘Bil 3arabi’ (in Arabic).
Authored by Tarek Haddad, Business Development Director at J. Walter Thompson stationed at Beirut.