The best place to smoke…

The best place to smoke…

…is right outside the venue of a huge health conference in Dubai.

January 31, 2010 3:38 by kippreport

The four-day Arab Health Exhibition and Congress 2010, which was held last week, included 17 internationally-accredited conferences addressed by nearly 400 speakers from around the globe, according to its organizers. It included 2,700 exhibitors from 70 countries.

One of Kipp’s colleagues who attended the event said that it was packed-and for good reason. According to a report published last year by Alpen Capital, the GCC healthcare market is expected to grow at about 9 percent per year, and is set to reach between $47 billion and $55 billion by 2020. And as one of our colleagues put it, people are always going to fall sick, and hence, basic healthcare is always going to be needed.

But apart from the obvious business interest in the sector, conferences like this are also intended to make residents more aware of the importance of a healthy lifestyle; after all diseases like diabetes are rising alarmingly among the residents in the GCC.

The UAE has also been campaigning vigorously to urge smokers to quit the habit. It even came out with a federal law recently, which bans smoking in numerous public places and charges huge fines for those breaking the new rules.

So our colleague, who attended the conference, found it extremely ironic that just outside the venue of the health conference, delegates and participants were happily puffing away.

Kipp is no marketer, but wouldn’t it have been a great promotional tool for at least one of the companies participating to put up some amusing posters/tools against smoking outside the venue? Or even for the conference itself to announce that it would ban smoking outside?