Author: John Grant
Publisher: LID Publishing
Reviewer: Ava Lawrence, communications manager, Atkins Global
The book has an intriguing premise. Muslim countries make up half of the CIVETS group (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and the Next 11, in which the new ‘Googles and Cokes’ will come from. The West needs to start to take greater notice of brands emerging from these rapidly developing countries, and to look at the way brands are formed and communicated which is different from Western practice, from which we can learn. The author John Grant believes these emerging brands celebrate craft, are collaborative and collective tellers.
This book is a bit of a curiosity. Not rigorous enough to be an academic work, nor practical enough to be a book for business. It takes until a quarter of the way through the book before the case studies, which are not groundbreaking and aren’t well written. The most perceptive points are sprinkled throughout the chapters, where people in the Muslim world speak, but there are not enough of these. They are the real rubies in the dust. It would have been better if Grant stepped back more and let the stories and examples be told in the first person.
For anyone working in an international business, especially in the Muslim world (or ‘Interland’ as Grant calls it, a clanging term), the observations in the book don’t come as much of a surprise. As the author had the luxury of the length of a book, I was expecting immense insights into the non-Western world of branding. It is more of a list of observations. Unfortunately due to the pace of change, the book feels outdated already, blogs, magazine articles and LinkedIn provide more up-to-the minute analysis from practitioners in the countries themselves, at the coalface. It also feels hastily put together, with some case studies taking the form of Q & A’s, often with an interviewer who isn’t Grant.
The ‘Muslim’ world covered is mainly in Turkey and Lebanon. Again with the luxury of the length of a book, I was looking forward to more insights and case studies from lesser covered Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Malaysia, Sudan, Algeria, Pakistan, Tunisia, Bosnia and the Muslim populations in India, Russia and Nigeria, for example.
As this is the first book in the series, I would hope there will be an improvement with the content in future books. The strategy behind the series needs to be clearer, as I am unsure of its intended audience. I would presume it would be part of the target audience, working in marketing in a global B2B consultancy and have worked in and with Muslim countries, but I don’t feel the book adds much value for me.
Star Rating: 2/5
