What I Learned at Markettcom Before Founding Sawwikly

I spent three years full-time at Markettcom, and I still work with them on specific projects when they need me. Most of what I do now — the way I diagnose a business before recommending anything, the insistence on systems over campaigns — didn't come from a marketing course. It came from those years, working on regional market strategies, commercial proposals, and licensing structures for global entertainment, lifestyle, and consumer brands trying to enter Middle Eastern markets.

The gap nobody warns you about

Here's what surprised me most in those years: the brands that struggled in MENA weren't struggling because their marketing was bad. Their marketing was often excellent — it had worked in dozens of other markets. It struggled because it assumed the region worked like the markets they'd already succeeded in.

The clearest example I worked on: an international animation studio wanted to license one of their shows across MENA and the GCC. On paper, it looked simple — the show had already proven itself globally, the licensing terms were standard, the studio's own team was experienced. But when we looked at the actual content, it was clear the show wouldn't land the way they expected. The cultural reference points, the humor, even some of the visual choices didn't translate the way the studio assumed they would.

Our recommendation wasn't "run the same campaign with local subtitles." It was to build MENA and GCC-specific episodes and content before entering the region at all — because without that, no amount of marketing spend was going to make the show connect the way it had elsewhere. A studio used to launching in market after market with the same playbook had to accept that this region needed something built for it, not translated for it.

That's the gap I ended up spending years standing in: translating global standards into something that actually accounted for local commercial and cultural realities, instead of assuming what worked elsewhere would simply carry over.

Trust gets earned before the marketing starts

That same project taught me something the content side alone wouldn't have: the content decision didn't happen in isolation. Getting to "yes, let's build local episodes" meant sitting through the licensing and rights conversations first — proving to the studio's regional partners and decision-makers that we understood the market well enough to be trusted with reshaping their IP for it, not just running ads for it.

That's the part a typical marketing course doesn't teach: a brand doesn't earn the right to operate somewhere by having a good campaign ready. It earns that right in the conversations that happen before any campaign exists — proving to partners, licensors, and local stakeholders that you actually understand the ground you're about to build on. Marketing only works once that trust is already there.

This is a big part of why, when I talk to a Syrian business owner today who's lost on what to do next, my first question is almost never "what's your ad budget." It's closer to: does this business have the trust and credibility to convert attention into revenue at all? Marketing amplifies whatever's already true about a business. It doesn't fix what isn't there.

Why I left to build something local

Markettcom was based in Dubai. I went back to Syria to build something where I could use that experience and actually leave an impact — in a country that's rebuilding, by helping businesses here grow.

Dubai will always have marketing agencies. Syria, coming out of everything it's coming out of, doesn't yet have enough people who understand both global-standard execution and the specific, current reality of building a business here. I wanted to be one of the people closing that gap from the inside, not advising it from the outside.

That's Sawwikly.

What carried over, and what didn't

The instinct to unify branding, positioning, and execution into a single roadmap instead of treating them as separate vendors — that came directly from watching how badly things broke when brands treated market entry as "just add a marketing budget" without doing the harder work first.

What didn't carry over: the assumption that a strategy that worked in one market travels intact to the next. Every client conversation at Sawwikly starts by throwing that assumption out first.