The Tunisian Institute for Marketing Nonsense

  Meet Lloyd Tunisian Insurance – a company that's somehow managed to win the creativity battle while losing the marketing war entirely. They've produced some of the most engaging insurance advertising you'll see anywhere, built enviable brand awareness, and yet completely forgotten that the point of marketing is to actually sell something. This isn't just another agency awards darling with questionable ROI. Lloyd has real heritage – founded in 1945, went public in 1960, went private in 2001 – and genuine business momentum. They hold 5.71% of Tunisia's insurance market share, trailing leaders like STAR (11.29%) but competing respectably with GAT and COMAR (7.65%). After the 2011 revolution nearly destroyed them – banks burned, mass vehicle theft, chaos everywhere – they've shown remarkable resilience with 20%+ annual growth from 2021 to 2024. So what's the problem? They've created a marketing funnel with a bloody great hole in the middle of it.   The Awa...

  Why a Tunisian bee farmer's instincts about human behavior could teach us all a thing or two Sometimes the most interesting business stories come from people who've never read a marketing textbook. They just watch their customers carefully and trust their instincts about human nature. Meet Hazem Boumiza, who took over his family's honey business in Tunisia and figured out what works by paying attention to how people actually behave. The Problem With Being Too Logical Let's start with where most people would have gone wrong. If you were a rational business consultant looking at Tunisia's honey market, you'd probably suggest either: 1. Sell directly from farms (traditional approach) 2. Get into supermarkets (modern retail approach) Both seem perfectly logical. Both would have failed spectacularly. Here's the thing about honey—and this is where psychology gets interesting—people don't think of it as a product. They think of it as nature itself, bottled. T...

Most brands fail not because they can't grow, but because they don't know when to stop changing . They mistake evolution for revolution, confuse modernization with reinvention , and end up solving problems their customers never asked them to solve. Enter Hamadi Abid—a 33-year-old Tunisian clothing chain that perfectly illustrates how brands can expand their footprint while simultaneously losing their foothold . The Golden Years: When Generosity Actually Meant Something For decades, Hamadi Abid owned a simple but powerful positioning: the everyman's clothing store . Their unofficial motto—" MAA Hamadi abid libesi mizyen jibli milyen "—translated to offering decent quality at very low prices. Not premium, mind you, but acceptable.  This wasn't just a pricing strategy; it was a brand archetype executed with surgical precision. They understood their customer: budget-conscious parents , style-aware students , practical adults , and large families . The brand ...

  Sometimes the most valuable marketing insights emerge from unexpected markets. While marketing professionals dissect the latest campaigns from global giants, a fascinating case study has been unfolding in Tunisia that offers lessons every brand strategist should understand. The Anti-Mainstream Advantage Peak Sports, a Chinese sportswear brand , landed in Tunisia in 2017 with a strategy that would make most brand managers break out in cold sweats. Instead of trying to compete head-to-head with the big boys, they embraced being the unknown newcomer . And here's the kicker – it worked brilliantly. The brand opened their first store in Lafayette , near central Tunisia, and immediately targeted what I call the " neopheliac phase " – those early adopters who get a kick out of trying new things. These weren't just shoe buyers; they were technology enthusiasts , comfort seekers, and training obsessives. The kind of people who love being the first to discover something good....

  Listen up, brand managers. If you want a masterclass in how brand strategy works at the most fundamental human level, forget the tech unicorns and luxury fashion houses. Look at chicken. Yes, chicken. Because in the unglamorous world of poultry retail, we see marketing stripped back to its most primal elements: trust, disgust, and the ancient human fear of contamination. And nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in the tale of two Tunisian brands: El Mazraa and Chahia. Why Poultry Is Marketing's Ultimate Stress Test Here's something quite interesting : some categories are fundamentally different from others. While tech companies obsess over features and luxury brands wax lyrical about heritage, poultry brands face a more primal challenge – overcoming their customers' biological programming. Think about it. When was the last time you felt genuinely disgusted by a smartphone or a handbag? But raw chicken? That's different. Every fiber of our evolutionary bio...

I have a confession: I've been spending an embarrassing amount of time thinking about tuna cans. Not eating them—God knows there are limits—but studying them with the obsessive intensity of a lepidopterist examining rare butterflies. You see, there's a war happening in Tunisian supermarkets. A quiet, vicious little war that most people walk past without noticing, wheeling their trolleys between aisles of what appears to be commodity hell. But peer closer, and you'll discover one of the purest laboratory experiments in human psychology currently running anywhere on earth. The Tunisian tuna market is teaching us things about consumer behavior that Harvard Business School case studies can only dream of. And the lessons are deliciously, brutally simple. The Beautiful Stupidity of Choice Here's what I love about this market: it's been accidentally designed to reveal the three—and only three—dimensions that actually matter when humans make purchasing decisions: 1. Price (...