Cut in Dubai, felt in Cairo

For years I built regional budgets that took the summer down, and I was the one holding the pen.

The logic was sound from where I sat. In the Gulf, July and August are the two months when the customer is not in the country. The families who can travel go, the city thins, and paying full price for attention in a market that has physically left is the easiest saving in the year. So the phasing came down for ten weeks and went back up in September, and every review I presented it in agreed.

Then I sat at the other end of the same instruction, in Cairo, and received it.

July and August in Egypt are not empty. They are the fullest weeks of the year. Cairo moves to the North Coast, the road out is solid on a Thursday, and a family that has been careful for eleven months spends properly for six weeks by the sea. It is the season a brand here builds its whole year around, and it arrives carrying a budget that was phased down because of a season happening in another country.

Nobody in that chain is wrong about their own market. The plan is one curve laid over two opposite seasons that happen to share a currency table and a reporting line. The Gulf is right that its customer left. Egypt is right that its customer has just arrived. Only one of them writes the phasing.

I had it wrong for longer than I would like, and what corrected me was not an argument. It was receiving my own reasoning from the other side of the desk, in the month my market was busiest.

A regional budget is not a regional view. It is one market's calendar, in a template, with everybody else's months underneath it.