One month, three businesses

Three brands, one marketing budget, and the group line for next month looks like every other month of the year.

That number is an average of three opposite months.

I have run several profit and loss accounts at once, and the thing nobody warns you about is that the group total is the least informative figure in the building. It is arithmetic performed on things that are not alike.

Take a gifting and sweets brand. The fasting month, expected around the middle of February depending on the sighting, is the year. Take a lunch trade in the same group. Those same weeks are the quietest it will see, because the customers are not eating at one in the afternoon. Take a household staple. The month is a slightly bigger basket and otherwise unremarkable.

Phase one curve across all three and every one of them is wrong at the same time. The gifting brand is underfunded in the only weeks that will decide its year. The lunch brand is buying reach into a month when nobody is buying lunch, and will reach its own season in the spring with the money already gone. The staple is handed a plan built for a peak it does not have.

None of that shows up in the group view, because the peak and the trough cancel and leave a flat line that looks like control.

The month will move the money anyway. It moves it by wasting it in one place and starving another, and the reallocation shows up in April as three separate explanations.

January is the only chance to move it on purpose.