About Us
The purpose of everything we do is to nurture customer relevance, cultivate your business outcomes with 10x alternative advantage through business innovation, people insight and design impact.
// we’d love to share our manifesto / نحب ان نشارككم بياننا /
> the purpose of everything we do: #nurture relevance: cultivate your business outcomes with 10x alternative advantage.
01/we have a journey
> an adapting firm. a renewed identity.
Our new identity is a response to the widespread recognition within business and marketing that "the models are all broken" and "the traditional solutions are all becoming less and less effective”.
Since our inception in 2002, our clients call us their customer advocate; the focused perspective. Our founders wanted to build on what our teams have truly shown - a different way of doing things.
It began with a question: how can we translate our MENA expertise to design and deliver 10x alternative advantage - to help brands and businesses spot opportunities in unmet customer needs, invent breakthrough concepts, and make organizations more innovative and agile.
Our objective was visual impact. We wanted our identity to better reflect how we use business, brand and experience design to inform and inspire meaningful progression and relevance.
We wanted our clients to live our approach that combines commercial and behavioural research, insight and analysis with boldness, beauty, technology and meticulous craftsmanship.
02/and a reason to exist
“We need to reinvent the way we market to consumers. We need a new model. It does not exist. No one else has one yet. But we need to get going now.”
“The traditional approaches are now obsolete. One hundred years of marketing thoughts are gone. Alternative approaches aren’t a novelty. They are all we’ve got left.”
“Marketers need to stop focusing on loyalty and start thinking about relevance”
“My biggest competitor today is a person with an idea.”
“It unifies everyone around a very clear approach. One that is oriented around the customer as opposed to different people’s objectives.”
03/ we have a belief, a conviction
—transparency ingrains how we communicate, act and interact.
brings together networks to act on systemic challenges such as education, food, mobility, and aging.
—for us the future is the trust economy.
We’ve identified four levers that successful businesses are using to win in the new Trust Economy.
—the strongest bonds are formed when aesthetic meets pragmatic.
Tap into a growing collection of business design tools, assets, and resources to keep your business moving forward.
04/ and a base for our foundation
—business artistry
In order to not be forced to stand down as a business or a brand, you basically need to stand out.
This is the foundation for Business Artistry. An approach that informs how kour&kour organizes, operates and how we facilitate meaningful change for our clients. An approach that requires a great deal of openness, collaboration and iteration within our team, as well as with our clients.
Business and brand owners need their experiences to be fertilized by concepts from outside their own industry and peers. They need to cross-pollinate learnings from different and even opposing industries. Because there’s a lot a bank giant can learn from a small art gallery, a global telco from an avant-garde fashion house, and a tech start-up from an architecture firm.
05/ we are one humble team
We are made of thinkers, doers and makers.
We come from the Levant, the Middle East yet travelled, worked and delivered across the world.
We speak many different languages, and bring diverse skills and perspectives.
We understand industry, start-ups, SMEs, NGOs and social community and we are fluent when it comes to the geopolitics and regulation in our region - and have the network to do so globally.
Yet combine, as one multidisciplinary team, to create quite remarkable relevant things in Arabic context.
Tatyana El-Kour
// Partner Expert / Food, nutrition & media psychology
“I am passionate about helping people to access evidence-based information while empowering them to be involved in decisions about their lives, defend and promote individual and population rights”
“Venture Design is a dynamic approach, rather than a prescriptive process. It helps our clients start smart, iterate nimbly, and deliver results fast. It’s our way to embed 10x relevance in MENA.”
“Digital technologies are reshaping every aspect of built environment. We are here to help embed 10x multichannel experiences with the direct involvement of the customers. For a bank in need to adapt, this was a successful user centered approach, an important business goal.”
Mirna Kour Fanous
// Partner / Healthcare, Wellbeing & Education / linkedin
“Design is a powerful tool for addressing challenges in health today. Recognizing the opportunity to provide a more patient-centered experience, Bayer worked with kour&kour to design new digital tools, spaces, and services that put patients first—even in an under-resourced setting.”