8 Sep 2026
Uzbekistan’s market needs to move from copying foreign templates and running one-off promotions to an ecosystem of its own — with its own data, standards and terminology in the Uzbek language.
Elyor Maksudov is Deputy Head of the International Centre for Digital Technologies "Enterprise Uzbekistan". Here he explains why the era of blind copying is over, and what the market needs in order to move from one-off promotions to a marketing school of its own.
Uzbekistan’s marketing and advertising market is steadily acquiring strong building blocks: professional agencies are operating, in-house teams are taking shape, and attention to reputation and audience relationships is growing. Yet a mature, evenly developed system is still missing. In most cases marketing is still reduced to basic promotion — launch some targeting, hire a blogger, collect reach.
Genuine systemic marketing begins long before the first ad goes live.
It rests on understanding the product, the problem it solves, the logic behind the customer’s choice and the reasons they come back. The market’s next step is the move from one-off promotional bursts to a coherent ecosystem in which product, service, analytics, reputation and communications work as a single mechanism.
Mechanically copying Western or Asian templates leads nowhere. We have our own language, our own culture, our own behavioural patterns and a vast young digital audience. International experience should serve as a reference point, not a stencil.
The dialogue between the state and business has become noticeably livelier in recent years, but transparency is more than simply having laws on the books. An entrepreneur needs predictability: they must know the requirements, the areas of responsibility and the mechanisms protecting their rights in advance. Substantial reforms deserve to be discussed with the expert community before adoption, rather than presented as a fait accompli afterwards.
Legislation lags behind technology. Social media, bloggers, recommendation algorithms and artificial intelligence have reshaped the landscape, and the practical questions are pressing:
Blanket bans are not the answer to these challenges. Effective regulation reduces uncertainty for honest businesses instead of paralysing them. The state sets the basic framework and protects citizens’ interests, while the professional community takes on part of the responsibility through industry standards and ethics.
The larger the company, the faster its media reach comes to rival the audience of traditional media. Advertising by major brands is seen by millions of people every day, and with that leverage comes direct responsibility for the consequences. It rests on five rules: accuracy of information, respect for the consumer without manipulation, a correct attitude towards national and cultural values, protection of young audiences, and careful handling of personal data.
A mature market begins where business measures not only the immediate sales KPI, but also the effect its communication has on society.
The notion that Uzbekistan is condemned to spend years catching up with developed countries is out of date. The explosive growth of technology and artificial intelligence resets past achievements and creates a common starting line. The country is capable of offering products of its own in several niches: technologies and language models for the Uzbek language, research into consumer behaviour in fast-growing markets, solutions for e-commerce and customer service, and analytics and data-processing systems.
The target market for such solutions extends far beyond Uzbekistan’s 39 million residents. It covers the whole of Central Asia, the Turkic-speaking world and dozens of developing countries facing similar tasks. A young market has one advantage — it carries no burden of legacy systems: there is no need to rebuild mechanisms assembled over decades, and next-generation solutions can be designed from the outset.
If we merely translate foreign methodologies and apply them at home, we remain consumers of someone else’s intellectual product. Maturity will arrive when we have our own fundamental research, technologies, professional standards and terminology in the Uzbek language. Whoever shapes the concepts and the standards ultimately governs the market.
This calls for the integration of three links: business, education and research. Universities should receive real market problems and raw data from companies, business should help shape curricula, and academia should deliver applied results for the economy.
It is time to stop reducing professional dialogue to successful creative work, blogger rankings and view counts. Society, the state, technology companies and universities need to raise the discussion to a fundamental level: who owns user data, how AI is changing the labour market and who answers for generated content, and which competencies specialists will need in five to ten years.
Marketing and advertising moved beyond selling goods long ago. They shape language, ideas of success, ways of living and the culture of society. What is needed is a permanent national platform for dialogue — a place that shapes not the agenda of the moment, but the picture of the market Uzbekistan wants to see in five to ten years.