Samah Z joins SteelSeries as marketing manager

Dubai:  Samah Z has swapped the world of trucks for the world of gaming, taking up the role of marketing manager at SteelSeries. It is a move that reads less like a career pivot and more like a homecoming: gaming, by her own account, raised her, and after years steering marketing for heavyweight industrial brands, she has now moved fully into the arena she has lived and breathed since the age of eight, when she began gaming at a time when girls playing video games still raised eyebrows. She went on to compete and rank at the top tier in MMOs and FPS titles, building genuine credibility in gaming circles long before turning it into a career.

Before landing at SteelSeries, Samah spent just over a year as a marketing and growth consultant at KITSU, working self-employed in a hybrid capacity. There she ran end-to-end consumer marketing for multiple brands, acting as an embedded lead across paid media, organic social, funnel strategy and community-led growth, taking full ownership from strategy through to execution. Her remit covered social content strategy, brand positioning and campaign messaging, alongside funnel design and optimisation across acquisition and retention touchpoints, work typically handed off to agencies that she instead delivered hands-on. She also built out community platforms, including Discord, as part of a broader engagement and retention strategy.

Her corporate grounding came at Daimler Truck Middle East Africa, where she spent five years and eight months rising from marketing executive to marketing senior executive. In her most recent role there, she directed marketing operations for FUSO and Mercedes-Benz Trucks across more than 30 countries in the MEA region, serving as the key point of contact for distributors on assets, events and budget support. She coordinated regional strategy across four brand websites, Daimler Truck, Mercedes-Benz Trucks, FUSO and Buses, led digital and social campaigns that drove measurable growth in engagement and lead conversion, and oversaw creative output from multiple agencies spanning production, PR and social monitoring. She also worked cross-functionally with sales, after-sales and the CEO’s office to keep communications aligned with business goals, managing cross-regional budgets and delivering data-driven insights to senior leadership along the way.

Earlier roles at Daimler Truck saw her producing regional content to boost distributor social performance and lead generation, managing multiple agencies, and analysing market trends to shape strategic decisions. Before that, she cut her teeth as a marketing associate at Bosch Middle East, tracking marketing performance metrics and supporting the creation of brochures, leaflets and promotional content.

The through-line across all of it, corporate and gaming alike, is community: understanding what keeps different generations engaged, from Gen Z’s scroll habits to Millennials’ click triggers to older audiences who prize trust and consistency. At SteelSeries, that instinct now has a home built for it, and the gaming industry has gained a marketer who has spent two decades proving she doesn’t just follow trends, she sets them.