Moving money between brands

Running more than one brand from the same budget has one structural advantage, and buying power is not it.

The advantage is that the seasons do not line up. One brand walks into the weeks that will decide its year as another walks out of them, and the money is allowed to sit in the first place instead of being split evenly across both.

May is when the gap is widest. One category is arriving at the heat it sells into. Another sold through the cold and is finished until the autumn. Take a fifth out of the quiet brand's month and put it where the demand already is.

I have watched that transfer fail more often than any media decision I could name, and never once on the arithmetic.

It fails because the brand losing the money does not hear a season. It hears a verdict. Its line went down in a document senior people read, with a name beside it. Nobody says the word performance. Everybody in the building reads it that way, because a budget is the only public number attached to a person between one review and the next.

So the money stays. The brand in season is underfunded in the only weeks that mattered to it, and the brand out of season spends into a quiet month to defend a line.

The rule therefore has to exist before the season. A stated share of every brand's budget is seasonal, it travels, and the calendar decides which way, written down in January when nobody yet knows whose turn it will be to give.

Then the money moves because May said so, and nobody has been graded. The portfolio's edge is only real on the day a budget leaves one brand for another and nobody takes it personally, and that day has to be designed.