When I moved from Moscow to Tashkent to build Uzum's marketing function, colleagues said — genuinely, without any condescension — "Well, it's simpler there, the market is smaller." That exact assumption is the most expensive mistake anyone brings into Central Asia from a background in Russia or a global organisation. The region is not "smaller" or "simpler." It is different — and that difference has practical consequences for every marketing decision you will make.
Over five years of working in the region, I moved from the first attempts to apply Russian playbooks to the Uzbek market, to forming my own understanding of what regional marketing actually means in Central Asia. What follows is what I wish I had known at the start.
Central Asia Is Not a "Branch Office": Why Regional Expansion Demands a Full Reset
The first mistake I saw among many expat colleagues was treating Central Asia as a less mature version of the post-Soviet market — one that simply needed adjustments for logistics and language. In practice this meant transplanting familiar assumptions: the audience thinks similarly, the channels work the same way, the values overlap. None of those assumptions survived first contact with the market.
Uzbekistan is a country with a young and rapidly growing population, where the median age is significantly lower than in Russia. It is a market where internet users arrived already in the mobile era — there was no "desktop e-commerce" stage of the kind Russia passed through in the 2000s. Kazakhstan, despite its closer ties to Russian business culture, is an entirely separate story: a different linguistic balance, a different consumption structure, a different competitive landscape.
Regional expansion into Central Asia begins with the willingness to set aside accumulated experience and stop using it as the only frame for interpreting what you see. That is uncomfortable. But it is exactly where the real work starts.
Localisation Is Not Translation: Cultural Code, Messengers, and Mobile Behaviour
When I was launching the first advertising campaigns for Uzum, we faced a challenge that looked technical on the surface: translate the materials into Uzbek. In practice it turned out to be a cultural challenge — and a high-quality translation alone could not solve it.
Uzbek exists in two living versions: the Latin-script alphabet (official, used in formal communications and by younger audiences) and Cyrillic (familiar to older generations and still widely used). The choice of alphabet is not a technical question — it is a signal to the audience about who exactly you are addressing. Getting it wrong means alienating a segment of your target group before they have even read the first word.
But genuine localisation goes deeper than alphabet choice. Communication norms in Central Asia are structured differently: emphasis on family values, on respect for elders, on collective purchase scenarios — where a decision about a significant purchase is made jointly rather than individually — these are not marketing clichés. They are real behaviours that affect how persuasion works. Campaigns that spoke to individuals as autonomous decision-makers consistently underperformed against those that acknowledged the household as the unit of decision.
Then there is the question of messengers. Telegram in Uzbekistan is not simply a messaging app. It is the primary environment for consuming content, news, promotional offers, and in many cases business communication itself. Channels with tens of thousands of subscribers function as local media outlets. A strategy that ignores the Telegram ecosystem and operates only through display and search formats misses a substantial portion of the audience — particularly outside Tashkent.
Mobile behaviour in the region is ahead of what many marketers used to mature markets consider "mobile traffic." The smartphone is the first and often the only device. This means that UX friction points that a desktop audience tolerates, a mobile audience simply does not overcome: a slow loading screen, a poorly adapted form, an awkward checkout — these are not minor inconveniences, they are conversion losses.
Payments, Delivery, and Trust: The Infrastructure Reality of E-Commerce in Uzbekistan
A marketer who understands the audience well but does not understand the infrastructure context is set up to market promises that the product cannot fulfil. That destroys trust — and rebuilding trust in a new market is significantly harder than not undermining it in the first place.
The payment infrastructure in Central Asia developed along a different trajectory than in Russia. Card penetration was historically lower; cash on delivery remained the dominant payment method in e-commerce for a long time. This was not because the audience was "not ready" for digital payments — it was the product of a specific history of banking sector development and trust in financial institutions. At Uzum, we built trust in digital payments not by advertising their convenience, but by making each individual transaction reliable and unremarkable. Reliability, done consistently, is the most powerful form of marketing in an environment where trust is scarce.
Logistics in the region is not a question of "plugging in a courier service." A substantial part of the target audience lives outside major cities. Developing proprietary logistics capacity or carefully selecting partners with real geographic coverage is a marketing decision as much as a product one. Because a delivery promise that is not fulfilled is anti-marketing — with a multiplicative effect in a culture characterised by strong horizontal social connections. An unhappy customer tells people, and they tell people.
Trust in a new market accumulates slowly and is spent in an instant. At Uzum, we deliberately invested in the first user experience at a cost disproportionate to its operational economics: the first delivery needed to surprise, the first interaction with customer support needed to resolve the problem. It is through these contact points that reputation is built — and no advertising budget can purchase reputation directly.
Building a Team in the Region: Finding and Developing Talent
One of the questions I am asked most often about working in Central Asia: "How did you find marketing talent?" The honest answer is that the local market for marketing specialists in 2021 and 2022 was small and quite specific in profile. People with experience in digital marketing, performance, and product analytics existed — but not in the volumes needed for a large-scale operation.
The approach we used at Uzum operated on three levels.
The first level was expatriates with regional or international experience in key positions where breadth of reference and experience building functions from scratch was critical. An important nuance: an expat who arrives to "teach" performs worse than one who arrives to build alongside the local team. That distinction shapes everything that follows.
The second level was local specialists with potential who lacked not ability but specific knowledge and practice. In Uzbekistan I met people with an excellent intuitive grasp of the audience, strong communication skills, and genuine willingness to work intensively. What they needed was structure, methodology, and an environment where making mistakes was safe and learning was built into daily work.
The third level was collaboration with local agencies and media partners who provided not only resource but insight into how the market works from the inside. This is especially important in the early stages, while the internal team is still taking shape.
The main conclusion about talent in the region: there is less of it than in mature markets — but those who are there grow faster when given real investment in their development. Partly because they carry fewer bad habits that need unlearning. Partly because the motivation to build something new on your own market is categorically different from executing a pre-built methodology for a global corporation.
What Uzum Taught Me: Marketing in Central Asia as Its Own Discipline
Uzum grew in a few years from launch to becoming Central Asia's first unicorn at a $1.5 billion valuation. I spent several years there leading marketing. It was probably the most intense professional experience I have had — precisely because no ready-made playbook worked in its entirety.
The first thing I learned: speed of adaptation matters more than quality of the first decision. In a fast-moving and undersaturated market, the cost of a slow but perfect decision is higher than the cost of a fast but imperfect one. This is not an argument for carelessness — it is an understanding that the window of opportunity is open for exactly as long as it is open, and then it closes regardless of your readiness.
Second: marketing in a new market must create the category before it promotes the product. Part of Uzum's target audience had never bought anything online. The task of marketing was not only to drive traffic but to explain why buying online is normal, convenient, and safe. That is category-building work — it does not convert into immediate sales — but without it, all the performance marketing in the world operates at a fraction of its potential efficiency.
Third: data exists, but you have to create it. Having spent years working in mature markets with rich analytical infrastructure, I encountered a reality where much of the data simply did not exist: no established panels, no historical benchmarks, no standardised market research. That meant a significant part of analytical work involved building proprietary data sources from scratch: qualitative interviews, primary surveys, A/B tests as instruments for calibrating audience understanding rather than just optimising funnels.
Fourth: fintech and e-commerce in Central Asia are inseparable. This is perhaps the most non-obvious insight from my experience in the region. In a market where card infrastructure developed differently, payment solutions are not a background utility — they are a central element of the user experience. A marketer who does not understand the fintech logic of their own product cannot effectively address the barriers to first purchase. At Uzum, the integration of fintech products into the customer journey was not a payment team's responsibility that marketing worked around. It was a core part of the acquisition and retention strategy.
Fifth: the region is not a monolith. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan — these are distinct markets with different regulatory environments, different linguistic landscapes, different stages of digital maturity. "Regional marketing" works as a strategic frame but must be executed with local sensitivity to each country. Otherwise it is transmission without communication.
Five years in Central Asia changed my understanding of what marketing means when the market itself is still forming. It is an experience I would not trade for any other — not because it was easy, but because the problems it posed were genuinely interesting, and the answers were not in any existing textbook.