Cairo goes home for Eid

Cairo is a city most of the people in it are from somewhere else.

That is a fact about the street and it is invisible in every plan I have read about Egypt, right up to the last days of the fasting month, when the city starts leaving.

The trains north and south are booked a week ahead. The bus stations run through the night. The road out is solid in both directions on the last working day, and half the cars have a box of sweets on the back seat. By the morning of the holiday, expected at the end of this week, a share of the capital's customers are three hundred kilometres away at their mother's or their grandmother's, in a town they have not lived in for fifteen years.

Everything the brand knows about them stays behind in Cairo.

The audience was built on a Cairo radius. The delivery promise was written against a Cairo warehouse. The apps that carry the order thin out fast outside the governorate capitals: fewer riders, a short list of restaurants, no next-day, cash at the door. And the brand has no shelf in the shop the customer is standing in front of, so for a week they buy what the local grocer stocks, which is a competitor they had never considered and now have in the house.

The plan says Egypt and means Cairo plus Alexandria, because that is where the data was, and the data was gathered in the eleven months when everybody was home.

For this week the address on file is not where the customer is. It is where their post goes. The campaign is arriving on time, correctly targeted, at a flat with nobody in it.