Most coverage of YouGov’s Most Recommended Brands 2026 went to the rankings. Emirates came first in the UAE, while Saudia came first in Saudi Arabia. I read past the league table to the survey on how people share their experiences with brands, because that part is a marketing brief in disguise.
YouGov asked 946 adults in the UAE and 1,002 in Saudi Arabia, between June and July, what they did after a good or bad experience. In the UAE, 26% of those who shared a bad experience contacted the brand directly. Only 8% posted about it on social media. In Saudi Arabia, the figures were 10% against 5%.
Good experiences went the other way. In the UAE, 38% of people sharing one left a review or rating, and 35% posted it publicly. In Saudi Arabia, the figures were 44% and 43%.
Praise goes public. Complaints, in these two markets, mostly go to the company.
Where the decision gets made
Marketing teams track reputation through what is public: the star rating, the review count, and sentiment on social. On these numbers, that tracking starts too late. If the survey holds, a lot of the angry reviews a Gulf brand sees started life as an email, a hotline call or a WhatsApp message that someone sent and then waited for a response to.
In most companies I know of, customer service owns those channels. Marketing hears about it when something blows up. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, I do not think that split holds anymore.
There is a second private route in the UAE as well. The Ministry of Economy and Tourism takes consumer complaints through its website, by phone and on WhatsApp. It received 3,167 complaints through its online system in 2025 and reported resolving 93.9% of them. A customer who gets nowhere with a brand has somewhere official to go before they ever write a review.
Why the review finally gets written
YouGov also asked why people share a bad experience at all. In Saudi Arabia, warning others came first, at 37%. In the UAE, it tied for second at 27%, just behind “the experience fell below expectations” at 30%.
Picture the review that comes out of that. Someone wrote to the brand, waited, heard nothing useful, and then posted to warn other people. That review is genuine. It may be angry, and it may pull the rating down, but it describes something that happened.
At FameNinja, our published position is that genuine reviews are never removed. Our work covers fake reviews, reviews that break platform rules, and harmful content with no basis in fact. A real customer’s warning is none of those. Being negative is not grounds for removal.
Plenty of owners still want it gone. One thread on Reddit’s Google Business Profile forum this month, asking how to remove negative Google reviews, drew more than 260 comments. The honest answer is usually that you cannot, and should not. You reply in public, you fix what went wrong, and you hope the customer comes back and edits the review. All of that is harder and slower than answering the email they sent a week earlier.
The trap to avoid
Once a team sees that unhappy customers come to them first, a shortcut suggests itself. Ask the happy customers for Google reviews, handle the unhappy ones in private, and watch the rating rise.
Google’s Maps policy closes that door. Under it, a business cannot discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively ask for positive ones. Pressuring people to post a review while they are still at the counter is out, too, and so is telling them what to say. Offering anything in exchange for a review, or for changing or removing a bad one, is also banned.
If you ask for reviews, ask everyone, including the customer whose order went wrong.
Two numbers worth putting on the marketing dashboard
The first is the time taken to resolve direct complaints. I mean the day the customer’s problem was actually closed, which is often a long way from the first reply. Every extra day gives a disappointed customer more time to decide that a public warning is the only option left.
The second is the number of direct complaints that later appear as public reviews. Matching them takes some manual work. Even a monthly sample helps. If people who emailed you keep reappearing on Google a few days later, the private channel is leaking, and the rating will catch up with it.
None of this needs new software. It needs marketing to read an inbox that customer service already runs. In these two markets, that inbox is where most of the reputation work happens first.
(Ankush Gupta is the founder of FameNinja, an online reputation management firm that removes fake and policy-violating reviews and displaces harmful content about companies and founders.)
