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My 2 cents to help your economy

Dear Saudi friends,


I have actually never been to Saudi Arabia. 

I spent a few hours in transit at the Riyadh airport, another few hours at the Jeddah airport. I booked those flight specifically to see what your airports looked like. Field research, they call it. In a couple of days, while on my way to France, I’ll do that again. But that’s it. I have never been able to step out of your airports and that’s really a shame. At this stage, honestly, I am waiting for the visit visas as if my life depended on it. I want to see what your country is like, in the flesh.

I hope nobody will be offended if I say this, but I wasn’t too impressed by the offer at the airports. Except for dates, there wasn’t anything much typically Saudi to buy. Not even a book to look at. Certainly if there had been a good book about Saudi Arabia, I would have bought it. I can think of a lot of books about Saudi Arabia that I would like to buy. I have researched, it seems those books have never even been written.

I hear Jeddah is getting a new airport. I suppose the dutyfree stores will be reconsidered and hopefully improved. I am sure it will be better, but I wonder if really there will be more Saudi-made products on offer.

There is another thing I have noticed over the years, along the same lines. I am not a Muslim, but I have many Muslim friends. Most of them have gone to Saudi Arabia for Hajj or Umrah at least once. Yet, it strikes me how I can never remember any one of them telling me about something cool that they brought back from their trip to Saudi Arabia, as a souvenir for the trip or just because they thought it was cool. It could be anything, a pair of shoes, a Tshirt, a piece of jewelry, a poster, anything.

I am not saying the pilgrimage should be turned into a shopping spree, not at all. I am not either saying you should sell the Mecca version of the same souvenirs you see everywhere. But you could certainly offer products manufactured locally, especially if they were made from renewable natural resources available in the country. Design, I would think, is key.

And then, there is something else, a pattern that maybe someone like me needs to respectfully make you aware of.

A few months ago, I went to the Paris Book fair. Saudi Arabia had a big booth there. The booth only had a few books, short novels by Saudi authors, translated in French. They were all about women in Saudi Arabia. Even as a woman, I keep thinking that you are trying too hard on this topic at least in France. I also thought this selection of books was wrong and insufficient. The point should have been to introduce Saudi Arabia to the French people visiting the fair. Instead, it looked like you were trying to cover something up.

Oh, Saudi Arabia, you need to learn and be more comfortable in your own skin. Don’t try so hard to please people who are not making the effort to at least understand you and where you are coming from.

And beyond that, it struck me that those books didn’t look like the books I knew. It made me realize that although standards for books vary a bit from one country to another, those books were quite far from all publishing standards I knew.

At this book fair, I had the overall feeling that, despite an obvious ton of good intentions, Saudi Arabia was not marketing itself properly, and that those particular books were also not marketed properly. Yet, this is important if you want to attract tourists, and even investors might be influenced indirectly.

I have a feeling this might be a pattern because about at the same time, I also met this Saudi scholar who is specialised in the Nabatean civilisation. She is fascinating to listen to because her passion as a person speaks for her. But her books don’t convey that passion. The truth is, most people don’t want to read a manual about Nabateans, they want to read a story about people they can relate to even if they lived centuries ago.

I have the feeling that you have a lot of assets as a country, but the pattern I see is that you seem to fail at packaging those assets in a way that makes them look attractive, at least to the rest of the world.

That job of packaging things is called marketing, this is what I studied and this is what I have been doing for the last 15 years.

I realise I might sound contradictory but I am not. You are trying very hard but you should just leave this to someone like me.

Marketing your own culture to foreigners is not so easy because you have to be able to look at your own culture with a bit of distance, and you also have to know the culture of the foreigners you are trying to market things to, and their tastes. 

A book is not just a book. A book about Saudi Arabia is a promotional tool that your prospects are willing to pay for.


For various historical reasons, it probably hard for you guys to understand how Europeans think, just like it’s been difficult for me sometimes to understand the Khaleeji culture. Only now, after being here almost a decade, I think I can.

Only now that I have lived away from France for so long, I am starting to see, what makes France really special, what is specific about our culture, what could be of interest to people of other cultures, and how.

Your history and your culture are very important things to market, and it matters to market them well, because they have the potential to create a lot of business and, in turn, a lot of jobs. A book is not just a book. A book about Saudi Arabia is a promotional tool that your prospects are willing to pay for.That's what they teach you in business school.

Books are one thing, but movies or TV series take things to yet another level. A TV series creates lots of direct jobs, film crews, caterers, editors, etc. and then, if done well, they create even more jobs. Tourism in Northern Ireland is booming because fans of Game of Thrones come to see the locations were the series was shot.

I understand there is a trend in Saudi Arabia to ask foreigners to leave, but maybe, you still need a few foreigners, not to do jobs that Saudi nationals could do quite easily, but among other things, to help you with this job of identifying those assets in your culture and packaging them in the best possible way.

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