Eid is not Ramadan

The campaign runs for thirty nights and the test comes in four afternoons.

Ramadan work is built for the night. The sunset hour, the late sitting, the message that has to land between nine and midnight. All of it is planned in January, produced in February and approved twice, and by the middle of the month the team is watching the numbers and telling itself the promise landed.

Then Eid arrives, and the promise has to be kept in daylight.

Eid is afternoons. It is children, three generations at one table, cousins who booked nothing, a queue at two in the afternoon that no rota was built for. It is the family from the film actually turning up at the door.

It is also the week the floor is thinnest. A great many people take their leave in the days straight after Eid, because that is when their own families are together, which is exactly right and exactly the problem. The people who carried the month are away, and the ones covering are the newest.

So the customer meets the brand properly for the first time in its weakest week. She saw the film during Ramadan. She came in the Eid days, because that was the first free afternoon she had. What she takes away is a forty-minute wait, a manager who is not there, and three items missing from the menu.

Almost nobody writes a plan for these days. There is a Ramadan brief, a Ramadan buy, a Ramadan wrap. The afternoons that decide whether any of it worked sit in the gap between two plans, staffed by whoever did not ask for leave.

A standard is not what a brand does on its biggest night. It is what it does on its thinnest afternoon.