6 Sep 2026
The market has outgrown its own system: the tools have been mastered, but maturity will begin when marketing enters business strategy and the market starts documenting and teaching its own experience.
Ravshan Mukhiddinov is a PR, media and communications specialist, lecturer in media management and media marketing at the University of Journalism and Mass Communications of Uzbekistan. He spent more than ten years working in Dubai — and looks at our market comparatively: not asking "where is it better", but which stages a professional environment goes through.
Uzbekistan has taken an enormous step forward in recent years. Business, advertising, digital communications and branding are all operating at a different level today: strong specialists and agencies have emerged, along with interesting local brands and high-quality content. But rapid growth also brings into focus the questions that used to stay in the background. The main one: can the market move from a handful of successful practices to a coherent system?
Looking at the market as a whole, it is still too early to claim that marketing here is systematic. Large companies already understand that marketing is far more than advertising: they run research, study their audiences, build positioning, and their marketing teams increasingly take part in key business decisions. Yet the opposite approach lives on alongside it — the one where marketing is remembered only when something has to be sold urgently, an ad has to be placed, or followers have to be brought in.
My years in Dubai made one simple thing especially clear: strong marketing begins long before the first commercial or post. It begins with fundamental questions:
If a product is first created in isolation and the marketer is only then told "now go sell this", the specialist’s room to manoeuvre is limited from the outset. The defining sign of a systematic market is not the volume of advertising, but marketing’s direct involvement in the strategy of the business itself.
One of the biggest problems is the gap between how fast the market develops and how well specialists are trained. Tools change at speed: a few years ago one set of platforms and formats was considered essential, today others have taken the lead, artificial intelligence is advancing quickly — and in a couple of years the toolkit will have shifted again.
What the market needs, therefore, is not simply people who can operate a particular advertising platform, but specialists who understand the consumer, know how to research a market, work with data and see the business objective — and only then choose the tool. It is easy today to find a good SMM specialist, designer, media buyer or content maker. It is far harder to find someone able to bring all of that together into a single strategy and answer the central question of any business: why are we doing precisely this, and what result should it deliver?
Closely tied to this is the problem of measuring effectiveness. Reach, views and follower counts say nothing in themselves about business success: you can run a highly visible campaign, collect millions of views — and leave the consumer’s attitude to the brand untouched. A professional market begins where we are able not only to execute beautifully, but to understand precisely why we are doing it and what we got in return.
Clear and predictable rules are fundamental for a developing market. Businesses need to understand advertising requirements, the responsibilities of each party and the restrictions in advance — not once a problem has already arisen or a fine has been issued.
Communications, meanwhile, evolve considerably faster than legislation: new digital platforms, bloggers, native advertising, AI tools, new ways of collecting and using data. Realistically, the state cannot regulate a field like this without staying in constant contact with the market itself. But the dialogue has to run both ways: business cannot simply take the position of "leave us alone to work" — the state has a duty to protect the consumer, and regulation, in turn, must reflect the industry’s actual practice and avoid creating uncertainty.
In a mature professional environment, self-regulation plays an enormous role. Not every problem needs to be solved with a new legislative ban — many questions should be settled by professional ethics, industry standards and the accountability of market participants themselves. The more mature a market is, the more responsibility it is able to take on.
Corporate social responsibility deserves a broader reading than planting trees or one-off charity campaigns. All of that matters, but real responsibility starts earlier — with what exactly a company sells people and how honestly it talks about it. Does it overstate what the product does? Does it play on fears? Does it disguise advertising as independent opinion? How does it handle personal data and audiences of children? That is the everyday social responsibility of marketing.
Advertising carries colossal influence: it shapes ideas about beauty, success, status, family and consumption. A single advertising image sometimes moves society more than dozens of official speeches. So a marketer is accountable not only to the client but to the audience — and as artificial intelligence makes content creation almost instantaneous, the more technological capability a specialist gains, the higher their professional responsibility has to become.
Uzbekistan’s intellectual potential is enormous, but the way we frame the question needs to change. We too often measure the market’s development by how quickly we have adopted a foreign technology or picked up an international trend. That is normal at a certain stage — every market learns from others. Sooner or later, though, the next question has to arise: and what has emerged here?
Uzbekistan is unique in the very structure of its society and its market: a young population, a fast-growing digital environment, a blend of traditional values and modern consumption models, multilingualism and pronounced regional differences. Working with an audience like this generates distinctive experience in itself: a global campaign can rarely just be translated into Uzbek — sometimes the emotional register, the visual language and the argument all have to change completely. That is not a shortcoming of the market but the foundation of home-grown expertise: strong work in tourism marketing, nation and place branding, promotion of the creative industries, and communications in the fast-growing markets of Central Asia.
For that experience to become an intellectual product, however, delivering one successful project is not enough. It has to be researched, documented and thought through. As long as a good case stays inside the company, it remains that company’s private experience. A school of one’s own begins to form when research, methodology, professional debate and the ability to teach it to others appear.
Uzbekistan is capable of creating its own methodologies and technologies, but the goal should not be to invent something local merely so it can be labelled a "national methodology". Modern marketing is international by nature: specialists in different countries use shared approaches, adapting them to a specific market, culture and pattern of behaviour. The right path is to know the best global practice, use what works, adapt what needs adapting, and create something new where no ready solution genuinely exists. The same applies to professional terminology in Uzbek: it should develop, but a term must not be coined simply to replace a foreign word — what matters is that it is precise and clear to the professional community.
Universities have a colossal role to play here. Teaching at the Media Management and Media Marketing department, I saw how quickly students absorb new technology. But a university’s task is not only to demonstrate a new platform or tool. A university has to teach people to ask questions, analyse and make decisions.
The tool will become obsolete — the ability to think will remain.
That is why one of the most promising routes for the market is a genuine partnership between business and education: companies need research and people, universities need real cases and market data. Together they are able to create knowledge that is not yet in any textbook.
Professional debate is vital for this market — and it has already reached the stage where moving forward without it will be difficult. That dialogue must not turn into a meeting of "marketers with marketers": it needs agencies, advertisers, government bodies, universities, media, researchers, IT companies and professional associations. The subject should not be which social network performs better right now, but the fundamental questions: who trains specialists and how, how well we research the market and measure audiences, where the line between content and advertising runs, how AI should be regulated, how to develop professional language — and why strong cases from Uzbek companies so rarely turn into research the whole market can use.
Over recent years Uzbekistan has learned to master new tools very quickly. Now a far more mature stage begins: we have to move from the question "What has appeared in global marketing and how do we implement it?" to the question "What has appeared here, and which parts of our experience might interest others?". Once the professional community starts asking itself that regularly, we will be able to speak not simply of a growing market, but of a professional school of our own taking shape.