What a rollercoaster of a year we just lived, I guess we can only agree our lives have changed, maybe forever. The interesting part is to be able to witness the extent of this change and how the current pandemic affected almost each single aspect of our routines.

Vittorio Barraja, Senior Director of Digital and eCommerce, PHD UAE

I still remember when I first arrived in UAE, it was June 2014, as an Italian expat I immediately found UAE convenient and well organized, everything seemed so beautifully ready for me; I couldn’t imagine anything more than that, this place became my benchmark of a perfect society.

Fast forward to 2021 I am happy I managed to organize my PCR test at home through a Super-App, my grocery will arrive soon together with the gas truck to refill my car as I couldn’t go yesterday.

E-commerce, in its various forms (websites, apps and super apps) became a central part of our life; Ipsos released the 2021 e-commerce study for MENA and addresses how the market penetration increased from 6% to 11% since 2019, almost double.

Research from the Digital Marketing Community indicates how this dramatic increase affected people across all age groups, identifying Gen X as main e-commerce shoppers (34%), followed by Boomers (31%), Millennials (30%) and 75+ (5%). Another interesting fact is the best selling categories of e-commerce products are related to Grocery, Skincare and F&B, these goods are all primary, which makes e-commerce a rising channel of primary goods distribution.

This massive shift in consumer behavior is forcing brands to accelerate the already existing trend of digitalization, it’s fascinating to witness how this process is differing worldwide.

MENA digital acceleration is mostly pushed by e-commerce market localization, as many major brands worldwide decided to shift from a classic centralized e-commerce to a local approach to tailor a more specific user experience, together with better delivery (that plays a major role in the overall consumer experience) and post purchase related services.

Internalizing e-commerce in a local market is not an easy task, it takes hard work and a different skill set, this completely revamped the job market for digital professionals. 

Google trends shows an increase of about 40%, in UAE alone, of the search “Digital”, over the last 3 years

This, combined with the changed habits of a world strangled by the biggest pandemic since 1968 (The Hong Kong Flu) opened plenty opportunities for brands to relook at their digital first experiences and strategies, mostly following 3 pillars

  • Maintain or increase awareness in a world dictated by sudden lockdowns that changed daily behaviours, increasing screen times on digital devices
  • The necessity of picking up and improving digital presence to withstand an improving competition 
  • Rebuilding teams to be able to deliver excellent digital results (and, in many cases, to define what digital excellence truly means)

The third point is possibly what we witnessed the most as digital leaders in the region, a fascinating process where businesses (especially well-established realities) truly interrogated themselves in what it really means to digitize themselves to reach out consumers in a different world.

This initial earthquake built the solid conviction of the necessity to have, as bare minimum, a digital marketing expert in each organization, most of the time together with an ecommerce specialist.

It’s not easy to shift from a slow but sure evolving process to such a fast-paced new norm, this affected multiple areas of any business, like recruitment. 

Not long ago I had an interview with a worldwide known Luxury brand for an E-commerce Director position, a complex combination of technical and leadership skills to be able to create a luxury website capable of selling expensive products to loyal customers, expecting nothing but perfection. I was expecting to be asked on my previous projects, on my Luxury knowledge, maybe a technical assessment on the combination of technologies and operations I’d run to execute such a delicate mission; it turned to be a 30 minutes conversation on how the brand displays product in their boutiques as the HR imagined a website to be the same, end of the interview. I have been thinking a lot about that interview, it’s not my place to judge recruitment processes, everything I can question is on the capacity of an organization to fully grasp my (or anyone else’s) understanding of a topic from totally unrelated questions, as we were truly speaking different words. This is now a trending topic in many organizations, everything is now moving towards a digital first logic, from HR to operations to Marketing, the science of Digital Transformation is quickly becoming a pillar of 2022 business development.

Like multiple colleagues would tell, my reflection of this 2021 is of a year that feels like a lifetime; started with a negative legacy coming from Covid-19 crisis, with the entire world wondering what would happen and slowly moved into an amazing year of growth and transformation and ending up with MENA being on the forefront of the most incredible digitalization worldwide (crowned by the overwhelming success of Expo 2020). 

However, as we all know, nothing comes for free, this is a fundamental time to invest resources on upskilling profiles to stay behind the incredible number of changes from businesses and from technology perspective and carry the momentum of innovation.

I am entering this 2022 with an optimistic point of view, knowing MENA is the best place to be to witness the future of worldwide digitalization and I can only hope many digital colleagues share my point of view and feelings about the upcoming future.