A NEW CITY DEVELOPMENT TO DIVERSIFY THE ECONOMY

Growing our Future Together’ has been a great example about how change management can turn a fertile rural area into a cultural destination.

After extensive research in Al Dakhiliyah region, exploring roots, heritage, trends, strategic goals, unmet needs, we developed a program that would position Jebel Akhdar as a domestic destination and would promote the local communities based on the four pillars of Culture, Economy, Environment and Society. The Festival aimed to help the local communities to prepare to welcome sustainable growth by making them part of the change through synergies, training and support. It is a celebration of the agriculture potential, local crafts and traditions of Dakhiliyah and Jebel Akhdar through a public display of what the region can offer. The program included the training of local SMES on packaging, marketing and sales techniques.

One of the rarest occasions, the birth of a new city on the global map provides for an opportunity to develop a place where people can live, work and play in a sustainable way. Our involvement with this development has been from its first strategic steps and over a long journey of design, sales and restructuring. Being the largest mixed use development in the GCC, we had to perform in depth research of the mixed use developments sector, locally, regionally and internationally, focus groups, ethnography and other tools in order to understand how the development can become a destination. The acquired data provided market input to the masterplan and provided the initial results to be used further as the city’s first assets. In parallel we developed the initial approach for the branding, promotional campaigns on a brand as well as properties level, including the city’s image to the media. Our focus has been on uniqueness, designing the storytelling with intent. For the launch of the project, a large scale event was designed using holograms and a platform in the sea for a light show. This intensive effort led to the sales of 500 properties in 5 days in Oman and subsequent road shows in the GCC. We also developed the Corporate Social Responsibility Program involving local entrepreneurship in order to support the surrounding local communities with a festival and a general platform for product sales. By using an old warehouse we hosted a number of startups and SMEs providing them the administrative and marketing support necessary to develop their products and sell them.