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Why it’s time for Dubai to think small

As start-ups surge, how will they face their hardest challenge – not cash but customers?

What local coronavirus advertising taught the world

Mark Fiddes, Consulting Creative Director.

From the world’s tallest building to the longest display of pies on the planet, Dubai excels at big. But what about small?

Based on the latest Ministry of Economy figures, small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 40 percent of Dubai’s GDP and make up 96 percent of companies operating in the UAE. Their resilience to Covid has been marked. They now provide jobs for more than 86 percent of the private sector.

Recent research conducted by Duke + Mir for online marketplace Zbooni identifies stratospheric levels of post-pandemic confidence among the 200 SMEs surveyed. 83.7 percent said they were optimistic about the future, with 89.5 percent confirming they had grown over the past 12 months. Private venture capital has seeded more than $1 billion into regional start-ups since January with the Emirates Development Bank pledging an additional $8.2bn.

Yet traditional wisdom says 90 percent of small business start-ups fail. More accurately, two-thirds never deliver positive returns to investors, according to Professor Tom Eisenman, chairman of Harvard’s Innovation Lab. As the primary cause, he cites the “failure to identify priority customer segments and gain a deep understanding of their inner needs”.

Wait. Isn’t that the job of marketing? Mining insights into customer beliefs and behaviour, then engaging them with creative impact? For most small business this is a luxury that only big business can afford, with its supplier network of ad agencies, media buyers, social media gurus and market researchers.

Maybe that mind set is about to change, at least in the region. Following the introduction of the remote working visa and the easing of the freelance visa process, those brand-building skills may soon be arriving in droves. As reported in Arabian Business last month, the doors are now open for affordable creative talent to add serious bench strength to the local SME economy.

Alice Weightman, founder and CEO of The Work Crowd confirms the UAE as a prime location for creative enterprise. “Covid has smashed through some of the traditional barriers to working globally and we’ve seen an 83 percent increase in freelance registrations in the first half of the year,” she said.

Over half of that number come from the UAE, which is one of the reasons for The Work Crowd’s recent set up in Dubai with their roll call of 7,000 freelancers worldwide. To SMEs that can’t afford all the skills under one roof, this means access to a new wave of talent – from PR specialists and AI developers to videographers and digital comms experts – as and when needed.

If this is the start of a major disruption in marketing services, how about a network targeted specifically for start-ups?

Meet Small World, founded by a team of rising UK advertising stars who quit their agencies during the pandemic. As co-founder Harvey Austin observes: “SME’s want experts who empathise with their day-to-day challenges. They don’t want to pay double to cover overheads. That’s why our model is not an agency but a community of all the talents, from strategists, media planners and creatives, to illustrators, animators and designers.”

Napoleon once derided England as “a nation of shopkeepers”. Admittedly, “nation of small to medium sized enterprises” lacks the memorability, but it certainly stands a better chance of success.

Mark Fiddes, Consulting Creative Director.

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