Advertising Part !!: Ramadan Themes

The Holy month of Ramadan took place from June 29 to July 28, bringing with it a sense of tranquility and spiritual awareness, as well as new opportunities to sell high-fat, high-salt Western restaurant meals to Moroccans. It was a perfect example of how international food corporations adapt products and marketing strategies to local conditions.

Some billboards, like the one for tea above, used more general Ramadan motifs - dates, the moon. The McDonalds ad below, located on a busy section of the main boulevard, also used the month in a more general sense to promote "Ch'hiwates Ramadan" (ch'hiwates translates roughly to snacks).

Others targeted very specific Ramadan traditions as points of entry for new products. I found the following two ads particularly striking. During Ramadan, the fast is traditionally broken with a family meal centered around harira (a tomato soup with noodles and chickpeas) accompanied by hard boiled eggs, chabakia (fried pastries soaked in honey), and dates, as it was the habit of the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, to break the fast with dates. This home-cooked, highly symbolic meal is eaten in nearly the same form every night of Ramadan, although there are often slightly different small savory dishes each night. Thus, it is striking to see Pizza Hut present its products as a part of the ftour meal, accompanied by a tall glass of Pepsi. Several of my Moroccan friends reacted negatively to this ad, explaining that you would never drink carbonated beverages to break the fast, and that the idea of a Pizza Hut ftour did not really fit with their idea of Ramadan.

A fried chicken chain also adopted this concept, offered a complete ftour menu with harira, eggs, dates, bread, milk, and an entire chicken. This ad also uses Islamic and Moroccan cultural motifs, including the crescent moon and the chicken dressed in a kandora, a traditional male garment.

There are many examples of cultural adaptation in advertising practices, but the blatant use of an largely Eastern religious and cultural holiday for the purpose of advertising largely Western food products and companies made it particularly apparent.