Turning a family industrial group into a named voice on Saudi industrial policy

The group had operated in the Kingdom since the 1960s and was almost entirely unknown outside its own supply chain. It had no spokesperson, no media history and no written point of view, at exactly the moment industrial localisation became one of the most covered economic stories in the country.

The risk was not obscurity. It was that the policy conversation would be shaped by others while a company with sixty years of operating evidence stayed silent.

We started from what the company actually knew that nobody else could say: real numbers on local content, hiring and supplier development, gathered over decades. That became the spine of the programme.

Rather than chase broad business coverage, we narrowed to the policy and sector press that ministries and investors genuinely read, and built the chairman into a credible source on a small number of questions rather than a general commentator on everything.

We ran a six-week evidence-gathering phase before approaching a single journalist, producing a data set the company could stand behind under scrutiny. Media training followed, focused on the three subjects the chairman could speak to with authority, and the discipline to decline everything else.

From there we ran a steady cadence of briefings, contributed analysis and rapid response to policy announcements, in Arabic and English.

The group moved from no media presence to a standing position in the coverage of Saudi industrial policy. Coverage was concentrated rather than broad, which was the intent: the audience was a few hundred decision makers, not the general public.

The most useful outcome was not a clipping. It was being invited into consultations the company had previously read about after the fact.