24 Oct 2026
Marketing in Uzbekistan still exists in isolated islands: it is seen as a separate service rather than part of business strategy, and cultural heritage as a ready-made advantage, although it is only a resource.
Lola Sayfi is the founder and art director of Human House. On why marketing in Uzbekistan still exists in isolated islands and how to turn cultural heritage from a resource into an advantage.
We now have strong specialists and interesting agencies doing talented work, but for now all of this exists more like separate islands. One of the main contradictions holding back systematic development is that marketing is often seen as a separate business rather than as part of a company's growth strategy.
Many entrepreneurs start thinking about marketing when sales fall, and when they turn to a marketer they expect a miracle: launch the ads, make beautiful videos, bring in customers — preferably yesterday.
Once entrepreneurs understand that marketing starts much earlier — with understanding the product, the audience, people's needs, their own uniqueness and the value the business creates — marketing and advertising will begin to form a system.
And it is not necessarily about big budgets. Over the years of working with Human House I have become convinced that you can build a recognisable brand on almost "guerrilla" terms if it has its own philosophy, consistency and a community of people who share its values. The other thing is that, sooner or later, the lack of a system starts to limit the growth of even a strong project.
Several problems stand out sharply in Uzbekistan's market:
When we talk about the transparency and effectiveness of the dialogue between the state and business, we need to separate legislation, the practice of applying it, and real dialogue. In recent years the state has engaged more actively with entrepreneurs — new platforms, forums and support programmes have appeared. But the number of meetings does not yet mean the quality of dialogue.
There are still not enough mechanisms that allow entrepreneurs to genuinely influence decisions affecting their work — especially for small businesses and the creative industries. Transparency is not only clear laws but also predictable decisions, equal conditions, access to information and the ability to discuss problems openly without fear of spoiling relations with government bodies.
I would like the state to act more often not as the organiser of yet another event but as a partner in creating a sustainable environment for business development.
If a company wants to advertise itself in a developing country, the best way to do it is through real social projects that become your advertising, creating a multiplier effect without unnecessary spending.
Social responsibility starts not with charity or one-off environmental campaigns but with a company's everyday activity: how it treats its employees, how honest it is with customers, what conditions it creates for suppliers, how it affects the city and society. You can plant a hundred trees once a year and film a beautiful video, and spend the rest of the time cutting down trees for construction.
At Human House, working with artisans, artists and designers is not charity but a natural part of the business model.
Real social responsibility arises when a business earns not in spite of society's interests but because it creates value for society.
Marketing can not only stimulate consumption but also shape the culture of that consumption and become a catalyst for the development of private enterprise.
Uzbekistan has enormous potential, but it is time to stop treating the mere presence of a rich cultural heritage as a self-evident competitive advantage. Heritage is still only a resource, like gas or gold, and it becomes an advantage when we know how to research it, rethink it and turn it into modern products.
Our craft traditions contain the principles of sustainable development and sustainable design: careful use of materials, repairability, durability, the passing on of knowledge. On this basis we can create our own design methodologies, educational programmes and models of creative entrepreneurship.
Moreover, our culture of human connection, hospitality and trust makes it possible for our own approach to marketing to emerge — through relationships between people, not only through advertising and technology.
Uzbekistan is certainly capable of introducing new methodologies on its own, rethinking other people's solutions and creating its own. At Human House we are at once a shop, a gallery, an educational space, an event organiser and a platform supporting artisans. From the standpoint of classical marketing this looks like insufficiently clear positioning, but it is precisely the combination of different directions that creates our uniqueness.
We have many such non-standard models, but we rarely study them and turn them into knowledge. For our own methodologies to emerge we need not only practitioners but also researchers, universities and professional associations. Technology and artificial intelligence lower the barriers, but they only amplify the thinking we already have — so we will have to create things ourselves, with our heads and our hands.
We urgently need to discuss these questions more broadly, and we are already late. We talk about investment and digitalisation but almost never about the quality of ideas, professional ethics, intellectual property, cultural identity and the long-term impact of business on society — and yet these are what determine our future.
Professional discussions must move beyond the circle of marketers: entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, sociologists, representatives of education and the state, and consumers themselves should take part in them.
Marketing is not only about how to sell a product but also about what values we convey and what kind of society we create. In shaping the National Brand and the country's brand, it is time to stop discussing only how best to sell and start discussing what exactly we offer the world and why it should be interesting to it.