Ibraheem Badahdah

Where It Started

The environment I grew up in shaped how I see consumption. In our household in Jeddah, nothing was wasted. Food was saved or passed to the birds outside. Appliances lasted a decade before being donated. Furniture was repaired, then passed on. It was not a philosophy anyone stated out loud. It was just how things were done.

Growing up introverted, I spent more time watching than participating. I noticed the gap between what people said and what they did. I noticed how small things—a cue, a context, a reframing—could shift behavior without anyone quite realizing it. I did not have a name for it yet.

One moment from a social psychology class in college stayed with me. A guest lecturer asked an auditorium of four hundred students how many considered themselves above average in math. Nearly everyone raised their hand. She then explained what had just happened: the above-average bias, a room full of people, all of whom thought they were above average. That was my first real exposure to cognitive bias. It did not leave me.

Ogilvy

A year in FMCG left me feeling that I was in the wrong place. I had time to think, and I used it. I started reading, taking courses, and trying to put language to questions I did not yet know how to ask.

joined Ogilvy. Over three years, I worked across public relations, events, and later digital and social media, across seven clients and under five different managers.

In public relations and events, I worked on Nissan projects including the Maxima launch and financial-results event. For one of those events, I managed the project independently after my direct manager and department head had left. All invited media attended, and 95% of them published coverage.

Later, with Hempel, a relationship that began in public relations continued into digital and social. One campaign took the form of a photography competition connecting the brand’s colours with Saudi colours, and culminated in an offline exhibition.

The work was demanding and unpredictable. When the team lost a third of its people, I stepped up. I learned that clarity of ownership and communication are themselves behavioural interventions: they change what people do. More importantly, my day job and my reading were finally about the same thing. I was analysing consumer behaviour daily and studying the science behind it on the side. The two kept feeding each other.

One course on advertising effectiveness brought another part of it into focus. It walked through the John Lewis Christmas campaigns, not the creative, not the awards, but how much every pound spent returned. An old campaign, measured properly, stripped of vanity metrics. I could not unsee it. This was not about reach or likes. It was about whether anything had actually moved.

The work at Ogilvy was rich. But it lacked the meaning and purpose I grew up with. The culmination of everything I had been doing and learning about behavioral science and impact measurement made academia the next logical step.

The Research

My PhD investigates the Value–Action Gap: why people hold genuine intentions to act sustainably and ethically, but do not consistently follow through. It sits at the intersection of sustainability and self—what we believe, what we value, and why neither is enough to change what we actually do.
Three studies. Each one is a different angle on the same problem.

Marketing Philosophy

Marketing has a perception problem. Some of it is deserved. Too much of the field runs on hype, guru culture, and metrics that flatter the report rather than reflect reality. Reach. Impressions. Likes. Numbers that move without anything actually changing.

My position is simple: if you are not measuring the right metric, you cannot assess impact. Instead of asking only how far a campaign travelled, ask: did behavior actually change?

Evidence. Rigor. Measure what matters.

It is a simple philosophy: marketing the marketing, without the seasoning.

تسويق التسويق بدون بهارات..

Beyond Frames

In my spare time, I photograph. It is where I go to slow down, to notice, to be somewhere without an agenda. I have shown work in group exhibitions and won local and regional awards. But mostly it is the practice itself, and what it keeps teaching me about paying attention.

That practice has a philosophy. I learned to see without assumptions, moving from chasing conventional beauty to something harder and more honest: observing without a template, without inherited ideas of what a good image looks like. That shift, from preconception to pure perception, is not unrelated to how I approach behavior. Both require you to suspend what you expect to see and look at what is actually there.