The Tunisian Institute for Marketing Nonsense

  There is a peculiar blindness that afflicts people trained in conventional marketing. They look at a business and immediately ask: what is the product? Then they ask: who is the competition? Then, armed with these two dangerously incomplete answers, they proceed to optimize everything in precisely the wrong direction. Yoyo commits none of these errors. And that is why it is extraordinary. The Third Space Problem Nobody Was Solving Let us start with something that sounds obvious once you hear it, which is usually the sign that it was not obvious at all. In Tunisia, families with disposable income and a desire to spend a pleasant afternoon together had essentially two options. The salon de thé, which carries the ambient energy of a Swiss banking institution  , hushed, tasteful, and subtly communicating that children are a regrettable presence. Or the restaurant, which is architecturally and philosophically engineered for the singular act of eating, after which your continued p...

   I've spent the last few months obsessed with Tunisian Facebook groups. Not in a healthy way but more like the 2 AM scrolling kind of obsession where you're convinced you've spotted something nobody else has noticed. And I think I have. What started as casual curiosity turned into watching a live experiment in market manipulation that shouldn't be possible in 2026. The question that kept me up: why do Facebook groups in Tunisia operate completely differently from anywhere else in the world? The answer is uncomfortable. Tunisia has all the machinery of modern consumer capitalism with smartphones, social media, digital payment systems, sophisticated marketing talent , but it's missing the invisible infrastructure that prevents the whole system from devouring itself. We're watching what happens when you can manufacture social proof at zero cost with zero consequences. And brands have noticed. The Trust Infrastructure Gap Before we get to the manipulation, we need...

I've stumbled upon something rather peculiar in Tunisia. Not a revolution in the traditional sense ,no barricades, no manifestos but a quiet commercial insurgency that's rewriting the rules of how markets actually work when theory collides with the messy reality of human psychology and relentless inflation. What I'm watching is this: a complete inversion of conventional marketing wisdom, where the brands winning aren't the premium players or the budget disruptors, but something altogether more interesting ,the adequate middle. The "good enough" brands. The ones that business school professors would mark down for poor positioning. And they're absolutely printing money. When Premium Becomes Preposterous Here's what's happened: inflation hasn't just made things expensive ,it's broken the fundamental psychological contract between premium brands and their customers. When a pair of Nike trainers costs what feels like a month's salary, someth...

  I have a theory about Tunisian television advertising, and like all properly interesting theories, it came to me sideways, through a circuitous route involving pregnant women, Finnish birds, and Renaissance Florence. For the longest time, I watched Tunisian ads with a nagging sense that something was off—rather like when you meet someone at a party and can't quite place why they seem familiar, or when you taste a dish and know something's missing before you can articulate what. The psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote about this phenomenon: your mind detecting an implicit pattern before you have the words to make it explicit. A woman knows she's pregnant with an idea, she noted, before she can articulate it. The unconscious knows before consciousness can explain. You feel the presence of something forming, growing, demanding attention—but you can't yet name it. I knew these ads lacked tension and clarity, but I felt and this is the crucial bit that it was more th...

There's a rather depressing game you can play in any Tunisian supermarket. Pick up a 2-liter water bottle. No, really try to pick it up with one hand. You can't, can you? The plastic has become so gossamer-thin that the bottle crumples like a defeated soufflé the moment you apply the slightest pressure. It's not a water bottle anymore; it's a water suggestion. Walk down the chocolate aisle and you'll find the same story, told in diminishing weights and expanding air pockets. Tris, Maestro, Gaucho ,they've all joined the Great Thinning. Each year, the bars get lighter, airier, more insubstantial. Pick one up and you're holding what feels less like chocolate and more like the memory of chocolate. This is happening everywhere, across nearly every CPG category you can name. And it's not just wasteful ,it's catastrophically stupid. The Misconception: A Tragic Oversimplification The fundamental error plaguing modern product management springs from two sour...