Cultural Diffusion in Branding??

Remember the crazy months of last year when everything and anything happened in Qatar? DTFF, Tennis Matches, TEDxDoha, Cultural Village and what not!! It was definitely crazy in terms of crowd pulling and outings and new places to go in Qatar! In that big world of all the buzz, glamor and happenings, I noticed a very tiny marketing strategy that I found very interesting.

I am a big time fan of Karak, which you all know is a special kind of milk tea and is undoubtedly one of the most popular hot beverages in town. I buy a cup of Karak everyday on my way to education city. The barista usually serves me in the usual plastic cups that has a little fragile handle which is practically useless. One day he served me Karak in a cup that was branded by DTFF, as shown in the picture below.

After I reached Education City, I went to buy a sandwich from Batteel, and guess what? The same DTFF cup there as well!! Then I thought to myself, Tribecca is definitely a New York company and now it is in Doha under Doha Film Institute. It was impossible to ignore their branding strategy during the film festival. From big banners on roads to the smallest things in life such as the Karak cup, they had captured them all.

It was interesting for me to see how a New York company was integrating with its' customers and mostly, taking materialistic culture to a whole new level. More than the event of DTFF, I was more interested in the way they branded and especially the small scale ones such as the Karak cup. For those few days, I felt I was in a different, diverse and very vibrant society. I experienced what we call in sociology, as trans-cultural diffusion. It was festive, vibrant, colorful, diverse and artful.

After reading Griswold’s Cultural Diamond perspective, I was able to relate the events of DTFF to the diamond shaped cultural diagram. In this diagram, the 'Producers' are the human resources of DTFF, the 'Receivers' are the viewers and customers or people all over th

e country in this case. The 'cultural object' varies from event to event, which in this case range

s from movies under open sky, to comedy shows and kids entertainment parties. Thus, the 'social world' here constitutes of a mix of all the above mentioned elements as a whole.

It will be interesting to see what Qatar adopts in the next 20 years with its advertising policies and what happens to cultural diffusion that we all are expecting with the opening of the World Cup.