On the morning of Saturday, February 28, I sent my first message to teams across Dubai, Riyadh, and Beirut. Not a strategy deck. Not a business continuity framework. Three words: stay home, stay safe.
By afternoon, missiles had been intercepted over the city. I wrote again. And the next morning. And the morning after that.
What happened next surprised me — not the crisis itself, but the corporate response to it. Across the region, brands went dark. Campaigns paused. Budgets froze. Briefs that had been live for weeks stopped mid-sentence. The instinct, almost universally, was to wait.
That instinct is understandable. It is also, as the evidence shows, a strategic mistake with measurable costs.
The Business Case Against Silence
There is a tempting logic to brand silence during geopolitical crises: say nothing, offend no one, weather the storm. Researchers call this “strategic neutrality” — the hope that staying quiet preserves optionality and avoids alienating customers on either side of a conflict. In practice, it rarely works that way.
According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, staying silent on a societal issue causes most consumers to assume the worst — that a brand is complicit, or hiding something. That perception is not merely reputational. Among consumers over 61 — one of the highest-spending demographic cohorts globally — 60 per cent say they would be less likely to buy from a brand that fails to engage on issues that matter to them.
The research on crisis response consistently reinforces this. Brands that issue prompt and transparent responses during a crisis see statistically significant increases in consumer trust, while silence and denial are linked to decreased trust and prolonged reputational damage — effects that outlast the crisis itself. Meanwhile, corporate decisions to visibly take a stand during geopolitical crises are positively correlated with improved brand consideration and purchase intent, with the effect amplified for companies with strong prior reputations.
None of this means brands should rush to issue statements for their own sake. Even small gestures of solidarity — messages that acknowledge what consumers are living through — can meaningfully improve brand attitudes during geopolitical conflict, provided they are authentic and grounded in the brand’s existing identity. The distinction between authentic engagement and opportunistic positioning is one consumers recognize immediately. Only 27 per cent say their trust in a brand increases when it focuses solely on products and ignores the culture around it. The other 73 per cent are watching something else: how you show up when it costs you something.
With 87 per cent of shoppers willing to pay more for brands they trust, the economics of presence during a crisis are not ambiguous. Going dark is not a neutral position. It is a choice — and it is being priced accordingly.
Trust Is Not Built in Crisis. It Is Revealed by It
On March 7, HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan addressed the nation. He called citizens and residents family before he spoke of systems and defenses. Within days, his words were on car stickers, phone cases, shared in songs across the region. Not as propaganda — as genuine expression.
That is not PR. That is what happens when leadership and people are genuinely aligned over years, not manufactured in a moment.
The same dynamic plays out in markets. In 2024, 71 per cent of global consumers said they trusted companies less than they did a year before — an erosion driven not by any single scandal but by accumulated misalignment between what brands said and what they did. Research shows a significant gap: nearly 90 per cent of business executives believe customers trust their companies highly, while fewer than 30 per cent of consumers actually do. A crisis does not create that gap. It simply makes it impossible to ignore.
Dubai’s own resilience tells this story in economic terms. Even through geopolitical turbulence, the emirate recorded a 33 per cent increase in total FDI capital in 2024, while welcoming 18.7 million international visitors — up 9 per cent from the year before. That performance did not happen because investors suddenly decided Dubai was safe in February. It happened because the confidence had been constructed, methodically, over decades. When the moment of stress arrived, the foundation held.
Brand equity works the same way. The companies that came through the crisis with their reputations intact — or strengthened — were not the ones that responded most quickly. They were the ones that had already done the work: clear values, strong culture, internal alignment between what they said publicly and how they actually operated. Crisis revealed that preparation. It did not replace it.
Three Recalibrations for the Boardroom
Communicate before you’re certain. The instinct to wait for perfect information before speaking is understandable — and in a crisis, almost always wrong. Consumers in an uncertain environment are not looking for definitive answers from brands. They are looking for acknowledgment that the brand sees what they are living through. Waiting to speak until you have something comprehensive to say often means not speaking at all during the period when it matters most.
Know what you stand for before you need it. The trust gap between what executives believe about their companies and what consumers actually feel runs to nearly 60 percentage points. That gap is not closed by crisis communication. It is the result of chronic misalignment — between brand claims and operational reality, between public values and internal culture. The companies that showed up well during this crisis had built something worth showing up with.
The region’s resilience is a genuine business asset, not a talking point. The UAE’s non-oil sectors now contribute more than 75 per cent of national GDP — the result not of a single policy but of deliberate, sustained diversification over decades. This is a market that has structurally reduced its own fragility. Over 200 nationalities, different faiths, one shared decision to keep building — that social compact is real, and it matters to how business gets done here.
The Region Is the Argument
The brands that went silent in February are already back. Campaigns have resumed. Briefs are live again. The pause is being quietly forgotten — at least inside the organizations that called it.
It has not been forgotten by the people who noticed.
But there is a larger point that the silence obscured. This region — 200-plus nationalities, non-oil sectors now comprising more than three-quarters of UAE GDP, FDI up 33 per cent through geopolitical turbulence — is not a market that rewards caution. It was built by people who made a different calculation: that showing up, consistently and with conviction, was itself the competitive advantage.
That calculation has not changed. The brands that understand it — that treat this region’s resilience not as a backdrop but as the actual business case for being here — are the ones positioned to grow with it.
The morning after always comes. The question is whether you were building during the night, or waiting for daylight before you decided to commit.
The writer is Reda Raad, group CEO of TBWA\RAAD
