15 Jul 2026
In Uzbekistan, marketing is still confused with advertising, and external expertise is used to replace local teams rather than reinforce them; until the market learns to trust its own expertise and develop its people deliberately, talent will never grow into a professional school.
Kamilla Muminova is Director of Public Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility (PR & CSR) at TBC Uzbekistan. On why it is time to stop confusing marketing with advertising, and how the market can move from isolated talents to a professional school.
A real strategy should emerge much earlier — at the level of the business, the product, the customer's need, and a clear understanding of why someone should choose you in particular.
For many companies, marketing still means, above all, communications: digital, outdoor advertising, bloggers, PR and special projects. First a set of channels is chosen, and only then, within it, a so-called strategy takes shape. Advertising is just one of marketing's tools, but in our market it often becomes its most visible part.
Even the strongest communication cannot exist apart from the product, the service, sales, customer support and a person's overall experience. So far, the market is better at launching advertising campaigns than at managing marketing as a full-fledged business function.
One of the main problems is that we do not invest enough in developing our own specialists and the local market. It seems easier to commission a strategy, a study or a creative concept from teams in more mature markets. External expertise matters — it brings methodologies, data and a well-trained eye. But the problem arises when it stops reinforcing the local team and starts replacing it.
This isn't a problem of talent. It's a problem of trusting our own expertise.
For talent to grow into an industry, companies need to develop their people deliberately:
Sometimes an agency is expected to figure out the business on its own, identify the problem, define the task and prove the effectiveness of its solution. But even the strongest agency cannot make up for a lack of clarity inside the company. The stronger the client, the stronger the agency's output: if there is no shared understanding of the task within the business, the agency gets contradictory feedback and ends up choosing not the strongest solution, but the safest one.
The market lacks predictability. What matters is not only that a law exists, but an understanding of how it will be applied — especially in advertising with bloggers, native integrations, the handling of personal data, AI, financial products and audiences of children. Technology and human behaviour change faster than regulation, so the dialogue between the state and business should begin not after a violation, but as new formats and risks emerge. Yet if the industry does not set professional and ethical standards itself, external regulation inevitably grows stricter.
A well-built social agenda affects more than reputation — it shapes trust, loyalty, employee engagement and a brand's top of mind. CSR is especially effective when it is tied to the company's strategy and its real role in society: then people see it not as one-off charity, but as part of the brand's identity.
Uzbekistan's intellectual and creative potential is very high, but for now it exists more at the level of individuals and teams than as an established professional school. Strong localization is not translation but serious intellectual work: a global strategy only starts working when the local team is able to assess it critically, adapt it and, at times, make a reasoned case for rejecting part of the approach. This is exactly where our own expertise takes shape.
The main question today is not whether Uzbekistan has talent. It does. The question is whether we are ready to invest in it as seriously as we invest in media, technology and external expertise.