One message for everyone

Open the lifecycle programme of almost any regional brand and count what it can tell people apart by.

New subscribers. First-time buyers. Repeat buyers. Lapsed. There will be a birthday message, a field for the first name, sometimes one for the language, occasionally one for the city. What there will not be is a field for which calendar the person lives in.

So the programme sends Ramadan to everybody and Eid to everybody, and both of those are close enough to right, because the whole region moves for them. Then it sends nothing at all this weekend, when both Easters fall on the same Sunday and Egypt takes the Monday after it as a holiday, and a real share of the list is inside an occasion the programme has never heard of.

Nobody excluded them. That is the part worth sitting with. There was no meeting where a group of customers was set aside. The message went to everyone, and everyone is a segment nobody designed, and a segment nobody designed ends up shaped like whoever built the system.

The build happened in Dubai or Riyadh, in English, on a template that arrived with a birthday and a basket in it. The calendar that mattered to the person building went in as a campaign. The other calendars were never a field, so they were never a gap, so they never appeared on a list of things missing.

More segments do not fix this. Naming the one person a message is for, before it is written, does. Say the name, the city and the week they are having out loud, and the empty rows turn up on their own, without a single new report.

Everyone is not an audience. It is the shape of whoever was in the room.