LaunchPad Expo: Why Exlnt Communications Founder Nermine Abdel Fattah says visibility alone doesn’t build great brands

In an era when startups race to capture online attention, Nermine Abdel Fattah, founder and managing director of Exlnt Communications, believes many businesses are focusing on the wrong metric.

Visibility may attract customers, she said during a LaunchPad Expo session on Saturday at the Greek Campus in Cairo, but trust, consistency, and customer loyalty are what ultimately determine whether a brand survives.

“Visibility starts at what I call the honeymoon stage,” Abdel Fattah said during the session, titled “From Visibility to Loyalty: Marketing and Customer Journeys That Actually Grow Businesses.” “But sustainability is something completely different.”

The panel, moderated by Ahmed Elgarem, co-founder of LaunchPad Expo and founder of The Blues Agency, also featured Hussein El Masry, Chief CX and Excellence Officer at TechSource.

For Abdel Fattah, whose agency Exlnt Communications has spent more than two decades managing campaigns across sectors, including banking, real estate, conferences, and exhibitions, marketing is no longer just about creating buzz. It is about building systems of trust around a brand.

“The visibility is easy, yet continuity is very difficult,” she said.

Her message to founders was direct: businesses that treat marketing agencies merely as campaign executors often fail to unlock long-term growth.

Instead, she argued, agencies should operate as strategic growth partners involved in everything from brand positioning and customer experience to product development and business strategy.

“Usually, they fail when clients see agencies only as service providers,” Abdel Fattah said.

She added that strong agencies must sometimes challenge their clients, advising them to improve product quality, rethink packaging, refine customer targeting, or even revisit parts of their business model before scaling marketing efforts.

“As a marketing expert, it is my responsibility to tell the client when the product, business model, or quality needs improvement,” she said.

The conversation also highlighted a growing challenge facing startups globally: rising customer acquisition costs combined with weakening customer loyalty.

Abdel Fattah warned that companies investing heavily in visibility campaigns without prioritising after-sales service and customer communication risk losing customers permanently.

“If you do not address people’s problems and solve them quickly, you will lose them for good,” she said.

For businesses seeking sustainable growth, she said, customer relationships must extend beyond transactions.

“The customer should feel they are never left alone,” Abdel Fattah said, emphasising the importance of continuous engagement and responsive communication.

She also encouraged entrepreneurs to integrate branding and marketing strategy into the earliest stages of company building — alongside financial and legal planning.

Abdel Fattah said founders should think long term from day one, building scalable brand identities that can grow with the business and eventually attract investors or lead to acquisitions.

“From day one, founders should work with marketing consultants or agencies just as they work with financial and legal advisors,” she said.

The session concluded with a broader message increasingly echoed across startup ecosystems: in competitive markets, sustainable growth depends less on how loudly brands speak — and more on how deeply customers trust them.

Attribution: Amwal Al Ghad English