Everyone turns green

Tomorrow, everyone turns green.

The logo, the feed, the shopfront, the app icon. A flag on the delivery bag. A line about pride, translated into Arabic by the afternoon. By nine in the morning the whole market will look the same, and I do not think that is a failure of imagination. It is what people do on a day like this. They wear the colour.

But a national day is an identity moment, and identity moments do one thing to brands that ordinary days do not. They show who belongs and who is visiting.

The brand that belongs does not need to announce it. Its staff are from here. Its menu has always had the thing people eat on this day. Its Arabic was written, not translated. Its post tomorrow can be small, because it has been part of the furniture for years and the customer knows it. Turning green is not a campaign for that brand. It is what a neighbour does.

The visiting brand turns green too, and the green is louder, because it has to be. It is the guest who learned the words to the song this week. People are polite about it. Nobody is fooled. The post is liked, the day passes, and on Thursday the brand is exactly as foreign as it was on Tuesday, because nothing about it changed except the colour for twenty-four hours.

Culture, in the end, is people asking whether this is the kind of thing people like them do, and the customer runs that test on every brand in the feed tomorrow without ever thinking of it as a test.

There is no shortcut through it. Belonging is built in the eleven months when nobody is watching: the hiring, the menu, the language, the price on an ordinary Tuesday. The day itself just reads the result out loud.

Turn green. Everyone will. Just know that the colour is not the message; the year before it was.