Hey!
Hope everyone is doing well. Welcome to the next round of the Sunan Weekly Roundup!
What we are working on:
This week we released an awesome article titled, What Brands Need to Know About Ramadan.
Ramadan is one of the most important months in the Islamic calendar, and observing fasts during this month is one of the five pillars of faith for Muslims. Fasts require healthy Muslims to abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and all vices.
Ramadan also happens to be the period where buying behaviour in Muslim customers increases. Consumer spending actually increases by more than 53% as people shop for food, clothes, shoes, jewelry, and electronics.
Charities also experience a major boost as people tend to donate more during Ramadan than they do throughout the rest of the year. The crazy thing is, even Facebook realizes this and has a few interest categories that one can tap into when running ads!
Between just these four categories, you are talking about an audience size of nearly 129.6M people.
With more than 1.6 billion Muslims celebrating Ramadan across the globe, this is what brands need to know in order to maximize their advertising impact during the month! Building upon what we talked about in the last roundup, definitely checkout the third tip, it’s a game changer.
My biggest takeaway this week: Quarantine Your Fear, Not Your Impact
The past few weeks have been crazy for everyone around the world. According to a recent analysis by Google, global Coronavirus cases have peaked to +629K cases with +115K of those here in the United States alone (as of 2:51PM EST).
Millions of businesses across the world have been impacted. World markets have literally been brought to their knees. In a period of just 15 days this month, the Dow Jones dropped by a crazy 26.8%.
Governments, health experts, and the media all around the world are asking people to practice social distancing and quarantine themselves from the public.
Reading these last few sentences can be really depressing. We are living in scary times. But we have a choice. We can let the chaos around us shape our mindset or we can take control and make our impact. In times like these, we need to quarantine our fear, not our impact.
This week, a dear mentor of mine did just that. He told me, Sajjad, we can sit here and get depressed by what we are seeing on TV or we can do something about it. Lets create an online screening tool that we can deploy that can screen patients and let them know their risk level. This way, we won’t have low risk patients choking the healthcare system around the world. We can proactively identify the critical and high risk patients and get them screened and into hospitals. And we did just that. When this application went live last week, we had literally 4-5 online screenings that were happening every minute! CRAZY!
Another major strain that is taking place especially in the United States is a shortage of face masks. Just in Maryland alone, there are 36 hospitals and medical clinics that are in an urgent need of facemasks. The crazy thing here is they are not that difficult to produce!
To help with this, this week Sunan Designs partnered with a local small business, Loose Ends Co., in creating these facemasks and getting them to the centers that need it most!
We all have a choice, we can let our surroundings shape our mindset, or we can take charge and make our impact around the world.
You have a unique skill-set that makes you special. Whether you are an IT professional, a mental health professional, a construction firm, or even a physician, you can make your impact.
Everything happens for a reason. Maybe this is our time to raise our ambition and make a bigger impact in this world.
Time to level up!
– Sajjad Husain, Founder & CEO
