Mazen Nahawi, Founder and CEO of CARMA and RAIYN, on reputation, leadership, and earning lasting trust
You’ve spent three decades in communications intelligence, and now you’ve brought four established firms together under one network. What problem in the market convinced you that RAIYN needed to exist, and what do you believe the traditional communications industry has fundamentally got wrong?
I have spent thirty years listening to what people say about organisations. What they are really telling you, every time, is whether they trust them. That is a human question, and it deserves a joined-up answer.
Yet clients were buying PR from one firm, social from another and research from a third. Each did good work. Nobody was joining it up.
The industry organised itself by discipline. People don’t experience a brand that way. They experience it whole.
RAIYN is our answer. Four founder-led firms working as one, so organisations can understand people and earn their trust.
You describe RAIYN as “trust-led,” but trust can sound like an abstract communications concept. From a CEO’s perspective, how do you turn trust into a measurable business asset and ultimately connect it to revenue, valuation, growth or resilience?
Companies don’t own their brands. Stakeholders and consumers do. They give you their trust, and they can take it back.
Trust is a decision people make about you, every day. You see it in the moments of truth. How fast a deal closes. Who chooses your products. That is revenue. Whether a regulator gives you the benefit of the doubt. Whether your best people stay through a bad quarter. That is resilience. Whether partners want to do more business with you. That is growth. Add it all up, and you have brand equity. That is valuation.
Trust sits behind every number a CEO is judged on. All of it can be measured.
My test for CEOs is simple. When something goes wrong, do people wait to hear your side of the story? If they do, you have built something of real value. If they have already decided against you, that value is eroding.
That is why RAIYN puts trust at the centre of everything we do.
Reputation has traditionally sat with the communications or PR department. You argue that it now belongs in the boardroom. What should CEOs and boards be measuring differently when it comes to reputation, stakeholder sentiment and corporate risk?
Boards review financial risk every quarter. Reputation deserves the same discipline.
Reputation is risk. It moves faster than any balance sheet, and it belongs on the same agenda.
I would put four things in every board pack. How our key stakeholders see us. Which issues are building. The gap between what we say and what people believe. And our culture. Do our people take pride in what they do? Are they ready for an uncertain future?
All four can be measured continuously, as they move. Boards that see them early make better decisions.
That is a board conversation, every quarter.
RAIYN brings together strategy, creativity, digital, specialist expertise and intelligence under one connected model. Is the era of the traditional PR agency coming to an end, or does the industry simply need to evolve into something much more integrated?
Agencies aren’t ending. But client demands have evolved, and many agencies haven’t kept up.
Clients want smart practitioners with actionable solutions to complex challenges. They don’t care which department a good idea came from. They want one team that understands their business and takes accountability for the results.
RAIYN brings a rare combination of capabilities, a powerful discipline mix, and deep marketing services that can be configured to meet clients’ challenges head-on, with the agility, speed, and scale to deliver. Brazen MENA and APAC, Cicero & Bernay, Salient Communication Group and SOCIALEYEZ work as one when a client needs it.
Ultimately, value is measured by what lasts. That’s why we focus on long-term value creation, built one communications interaction at a time.
One of the biggest shifts in business is the explosion of AI and real-time intelligence. How do you see AI changing the communications industry over the next five years and where do you believe human judgment will remain impossible to replace?
AI is already doing the groundwork. Summarising, first drafts, routine tasks. Over the next five years, that will only grow. Our people become interpreters. They reach the interesting work faster.
Marketing services are often seen as the area most ripe for AI. So we choose to master it. We have built our own AI systems across RAIYN, so our people spend their time on what is most valuable for clients.
Judgement is different. AI can’t sit with a CEO the night before a difficult announcement and tell them what they don’t want to hear. That takes experience, courage and trust.
It is there in our name. RAIYN holds both AI and Ai: intelligence and humanity. AI should support decisions; people make them.
MENA is increasingly producing companies, brands and institutions with genuinely global ambitions. Do you believe the region is still borrowing communications models from London, New York and other established markets or are we now entering a period where MENA can export its own model of reputation and influence to the world?
For a long time, the region imported its communications playbook. That has changed.
MENA companies going global need partners who understand where they come from and where they are going. They face different stakeholders, expectations and levels of disclosure. And they want to keep their identity.
The people of this region are best suited to speak on its behalf. RAIYN is built on that belief. Our cultural fluency is our strength, and few in our sector can match it at our scale.
Even the way we use AI is different. Many models rely on Western data. They miss our languages and our dialects. Ours understand them.
It starts at home. In the region, we are developing a new generation of national communications experts, aligned with in-country value standards, fluent across disciplines and ready for an AI-enabled industry.
RAIYN is made in MENA and built for the world. The region is writing its own rules now, and exporting them.
You’ve brought together four businesses that each have their own culture, leadership and specialist identity. What is the hardest part of building a network like RAIYN: integrating capabilities, aligning people, changing client behaviour, or creating a completely new business culture?
I have brought together four different companies. Different specialisms. Different personalities. Different leaders. What unites them is a proven track record and, above all, shared values. Trust. Care. Partnership. Quality.
That is why it has come together naturally. It has taken time, and it should. Strong cultures are built with care.
We are creating one shared culture across RAIYN, without diluting the personality or identity of any of the four. The work is in building shared habits. Being agile enough to pivot across disciplines as events unfold. Being guided by foresight that can cope with multiple scenarios. That balance is our strength.
One of our guiding principles is that every day is a learning day. Our account teams are staffed on expertise, regardless of which company people come from. That is how we have recently won new business in real estate and hospitality.
Communications is often criticised for measuring activity rather than impact: media coverage, impressions, reach and engagement rather than actual business outcomes. What should clients demand from their communications partners today, and what metrics do you believe genuinely matter?
Clients should demand impact, and expect their partners to prove it.
Many of our client partnerships have lasted for years. Like any relationship, a partnership needs nourishing to grow. So clients and their partners should demand more of each other. More innovation. More value. Fresh thinking for greater challenges.
Impressions tell you how many people might have seen something. The real question is whether anyone changed their mind. Did they trust you more? Did they choose you? Did they stay?
That is where CARMA comes in. It is part of our group, measuring what people think, say and feel about organisations, in real time, across markets and languages. Every engagement starts with intelligence and ends with evidence of impact.
The metrics worth tracking are the ones a CEO already cares about. Reputation. Sentiment. Share of voice. And the business outcomes they drive.
Ultimately, we measure ourselves by our clients’ growth.
If we look five to ten years ahead, what will separate the organisations that earn stakeholder trust from those that simply spend more money communicating? And what uncomfortable change do CEOs need to make inside their businesses before communications can actually work?
The organisations that earn trust will be the ones whose actions match their words. People check in real time now. Money buys attention. Consistency earns trust.
They will also be the ones that listen more and use business and market intelligence wisely.
The uncomfortable change starts with the CEO. Leaders are steering transformation through fast-changing technology and uncertain outcomes, whatever the hype. The hardest words for any senior executive are “I don’t know.” Saying them is a strength. It leads to better questions and better decisions.
That means looking within. Understanding your own bias. Letting go of legacy ways of thinking and operating.
The business mechanics will always count. The human dynamics count just as much. They need to be as resilient, robust and ready for the future as the business itself.
You’ve called RAIYN “the communications network of the future.” If we sit down together five years from now and you tell us RAIYN has achieved exactly what you set out to build, what will have changed for your clients, for the communications industry and for the role MENA plays on the global business stage?
RAIYN began as a promise. To bring people together and to build respect. In five years, I want that promise kept.
Clients will be the standard setters, the organisations others measure themselves against. They will say we saw the whole picture and told them the truth, even when it was inconvenient. That is what I will be proudest of.
The industry will have its new dawn. Trust will be treated as a business asset and discussed in every boardroom.
And the region will lead. The world will look to MENA to understand how to build reputation.
RAIYN draws its name from light and rain. Both make things grow. That is what I want us to have done, for our clients, our people and our region.