I got asked, more bluntly than usual, why my research bothers with four countries instead of picking one and going deep. Fair question, and one I've now been asked often enough that I've stopped treating it as a challenge and started treating it as the actual thesis. Here's the honest answer: because I don't trust a definition of "authentic brand" that only had to survive being tested in one culture.
The word that does too much work
"Authenticity" shows up constantly in brand theory, almost always treated as if it means the same thing everywhere it's used. It doesn't, and I think that's a real gap in a lot of Western-built brand frameworks, not a minor translation issue. Authenticity is a trust judgment, and trust judgments are built on whatever a given culture has learned, over time, actually predicts trustworthiness. That's not the same input everywhere, and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory — one of the three theoretical pillars underneath my own research, alongside Dynamic Capabilities Theory and Brand Identity Theory — gives me a way to talk about why, without just gesturing vaguely at "cultural differences" and moving on to the next slide.
Gulf trust runs through relationship, not just disclosure
The UAE and Saudi Arabia both sit, broadly, in cultural clusters characterized by higher power distance and stronger collectivist orientation than most Western brand theory assumes as a default. In practice, for a brand, that tends to mean authenticity is read relationally as much as informationally — trust gets built through hospitality, through relationship continuity, through the sense that a brand understands and respects the social fabric it's operating inside, not purely through how transparently it discloses its processes. A brand that's technically forthcoming but relationally cold can still read as inauthentic here in a way that a purely disclosure-based Western framework wouldn't fully predict, because that framework was largely built to explain a different trust economy in the first place.
I've seen this play out directly in client work, where the instinct to "just be more transparent" as a fix for a trust problem missed the actual lever entirely. The brand wasn't being read as evasive. It was being read as a stranger who hadn't yet earned the kind of relational familiarity a Gulf audience associates with a business worth trusting with something meaningful. More disclosure, in that situation, didn't close the gap. It just produced a more transparent stranger, which isn't actually the upgrade it sounds like on paper.
Morocco: authenticity as a layered, code-switching act
Morocco is my own context, and I chose it deliberately rather than defaulting to it. Moroccan brand identity sits at the intersection of Amazigh heritage, Arab-Islamic culture, and a French colonial layer that still shapes language, education, and class signaling today — often within a single conversation, where someone moves between Darija, French, and Modern Standard Arabic depending on who they're talking to and what they're establishing about themselves. Authenticity here isn't a single register. It's the ability to code-switch credibly across registers without any one of them reading as a costume — which is a much harder, and much less discussed, version of the "be consistent" advice most brand frameworks hand out without qualification.
This matters more than it might sound like it does for a brand exporting out of Morocco, which is a scenario I work with often, and one I don't think most standard positioning frameworks have a native way of describing. A brand that leans entirely into one register to seem more legible to an outside market — flattening its French layer to look more "authentically Moroccan" to a European buyer, say — can end up reading as less authentic to the exact domestic audience whose actual lived experience includes all three registers moving together, not one isolated for export and polished up for someone else's convenience.
Estonia: the disconfirming case, on purpose
Estonia is doing different work in my research than the other three. In the language critical realism uses, it's a disconfirming case — a context chosen specifically to test whether my framework holds up outside the conditions it was built to explain, rather than one more example confirming what I already expected. Estonia is small, hyper-digitized, and sits toward the individualist, lower-power-distance end of the cultural spectrum relative to the Gulf and North Africa. It's also the closest thing to a fully digital society that currently exists — nearly all public services are available online, run through a secure data-exchange backbone, with citizens able to see exactly which official accessed their records and when. Authenticity, in that kind of environment, reads as procedural more than relational: trust is built through verifiable, transparent systems that behave predictably, not through the warmth of the interaction wrapped around them.
That's about as far from Gulf relational trust as you can get inside the same research design, which is exactly why it earns its place. If a claim about how Brand Drift operates holds up in a culture built on procedural, system-level trust and one built on relational, hospitality-driven trust at the same time, that claim is doing real theoretical work. If it only holds in one, I've built a description of a place, not a framework that travels.
Why Kapferer's prism needed a fourth country before I trusted it
Kapferer's brand identity prism includes a facet called "culture" — the set of values and codes a brand draws on beyond its own product — sitting alongside facets like physique, personality, and relationship. Most applications of the prism I've come across treat that culture facet as something to fill in once, describing the culture the brand happens to originate from, and then leave largely static across every market the brand later expands into. My four-country design pushes back on that treatment directly. If culture is genuinely one of the six facets constituting brand identity, then a brand operating across four different cultural trust economies isn't dealing with one static culture facet — it's dealing with four different readings of the same facet, potentially pulling in different directions depending on which audience is doing the reading. A framework that can't account for that isn't wrong, exactly. It's just been asked a question — does identity hold steady across radically different trust economies — that it was never actually built to answer, because it was built inside a market homogeneous enough that the question never had to come up.
Why this isn't just academic throat-clearing
Here's why a founder, not just a fellow researcher, should care about this distinction. If you're building a brand that operates across more than one of these markets — and increasingly, across this region, a lot of you are — a single "authentic voice" playbook, built for one cultural trust economy, will misfire the moment it's deployed somewhere reading trust through a different lens entirely. The AI-drafted customer reply that reads as warm and appropriately relational in Riyadh can read as vague and evasive in Tallinn, precisely because Tallinn is listening for procedural clarity, not relational warmth, as its signal of trustworthiness. Get that backwards, and you can be perfectly on-brand by one culture's definition of authentic and quietly failing by another's, without ever violating a single stated value on paper — which is exactly the kind of failure a values checklist alone will never catch, because the values weren't broken. The reading of them was.
What I'm actually building toward
None of this means "authenticity" is meaningless across cultures, or that a brand needs a completely different identity in every market it touches — that would just be sameness's opposite failure mode, fragmentation instead of flattening. What it means is that the mechanism by which authenticity gets read has to be treated as a variable in the framework itself, not assumed constant and quietly imported from wherever the theory happened to get written. That's the piece I think is missing from most existing brand governance work, and it's the piece I'm trying to build back in, one disconfirming case at a time, country by country, until the framework has actually had to defend itself somewhere it wasn't originally written to survive.
I'd rather spend the extra years on four countries and end up with something that travels than publish something faster that only ever describes the place it was born in, dressed up as a universal claim it never earned the right to make.
Operating across more than one of these markets and unsure whether your brand voice is actually landing the same way in each? Get Your Free Brand Audit → and let's map where it might be quietly misfiring.
References
Centre for Public Impact. (2024). E-Estonia, the information society since 1997.
e-Estonia. (2021). E-services & registries.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
Hofstede Insights. (n.d.). Country comparison tool.
Kapferer, J.-N. (2008). The New Strategic Brand Management. Kogan Page.