Nejib Ghanmi

Every organisation already knows what it is.

Almost none of them have been asked properly.

Brand strategy and
creative direction
Doha, Qatar

I do not invent brands. I find the one already running the organisation, name it accurately, and build everything from there. It takes longer than inventing something. It survives contact with reality.

The work
2004 to now

Twenty years of this has gone into airports, banks, sovereign institutions and a World Cup.

Qatar Foundation / Hamad International Airport / Changi Airport / Commercial Bank / United Overseas Bank / Alinma Bank / FIFA World Cup 2022 / Expo 2023 Doha / Telefónica / Royal Air Maroc / Barzan Holdings / Hassad Food / Lusail International Circuit / Aswaaq / Downtown Dubai / Sudatel

The Aswaaq brand programme, built at Landor, took a Bronze Lion at Cannes for Design and Art Direction.

Approach
Three stages

A brand behaves like a person. It gets conceived, born, and then has to live.

  1. Stage oneConception

    A brand has two parents: the business and the people it serves. What they have already produced between them exists whether anyone has written it down or not. This stage finds it, in evidence, before a single decision is designed.

  2. Stage twoBirth

    An organisation that cannot say where it is going cannot be led there. Here the ambition gets written in language people repeat to each other without a slide in front of them.

  3. Stage threeLife

    Identity, behaviour, language, and the thousand small decisions made afterwards by people I will never meet. A foundation is only worth building if it holds when I am not in the room.

After twenty years I stopped treating my own judgement as the instrument and started building one. HUB is a protocol for observing an organisation and setting what it declares against what it actually lives, evidence first, interpretation second, with a written record of which is which. hubprotocol.org

Record
Positions and training

Five agencies, three continents, one discipline.

I also paint, in oil, and have done for about as long as I have done this. The work is at ghanmiart.com.

If something in your organisation is not adding up, that is usually the interesting part.

+974 3339 3620 Doha, Qatar