An offer in one breath

Every August the stationery shops in Cairo put an offer on the door, and every August I watch whoever is on the till fail to say it.

They try. Twenty per cent off school bags, but only the ones over three hundred Egyptian pounds, but not the branded ones, and only with two notebooks, and the notebooks have to be the large size, and it ends Thursday. Somewhere around the second "but" the mother at the counter has stopped listening. There is a child pulling at her sleeve and a school WhatsApp list on her phone with eleven items still on it.

I have built offers like that. Every condition was there for a reason, and the reason was always margin. The minimum basket protects the average order. The exclusion protects the line that would have sold anyway. The tier protects the discount from the customer who only wanted one thing. Each clause is sensible on its own, each one costs a piece of the sentence, and the sentence is the only part of the offer the customer ever meets.

An offer that cannot be said in one breath at a counter is a spreadsheet stuck to the glass, and nobody at a counter in August has time to read a spreadsheet.

The test I use is the smallest one I know. Say the offer to the person on the till and ask them to repeat it to someone who is already annoyed. If they cannot, take a condition away. Then another. Keep going until it fits in one breath, then look at the margin and decide whether the offer is still worth running. Sometimes it is not, and that is a cheaper answer than the one on the door.

The mother at the counter is not going to do the arithmetic. She is going to do the other shop.