Awareness does not stay bought

The annual plans are being written this week, and almost every one of them rests on a line nobody says out loud: that the same city will be standing there in December.

In every Gulf market I have worked in, that is the weakest assumption in the document.

A share of the people who know the brand properly, who have a usual order and a usual branch, will not be here at the end of the year. A contract ends. A company reorganises. A family decides the fees no longer make sense, or a better job comes up somewhere else. They do not leave the way a subscriber leaves, with a cancellation you can count. They leave the country, and the brand learns about it as a number that softened slightly in one district.

Coming the other way is the same movement in reverse. People arrive every month who have never heard of any of it: not the brand, not the competitor, not the category leader that everyone in the meeting room assumes is famous.

Cairo does not work this way. The people who knew you last year are still there, and what you built stays built.

So awareness in a Gulf city does not behave like an asset that accumulates. Last year's money bought recognition inside a population that has since been partly exchanged for a different one.

Which is why the awareness line is the wrong one to cut in January. It gets presented as the luxury above performance, the thing you buy when the results allow it. In a market that quietly changes its people every year, it is not a luxury. It is maintenance, and the year a business stops paying for it is not the year it finds out.