Printed for one month

The Ramadan pack goes to print this month, which means the Ramadan forecast was made this month, by whoever signed the print order.

Nobody calls it a forecast. It is a quantity on a purchase order, settled between procurement, the printer and the supply chain, and it is arrived at from the two least strategic numbers in the business: the shortest run the printer will quote at a sensible unit cost, and what the distributors and the buyers have already agreed to take.

Marketing gets consulted on the artwork.

Consider what that quantity decides. A pack carrying a lantern, or a crescent, or the name of the month set across the front panel, has a working life that ends when Eid does. After that it is inventory with a date on it, and it goes the same way every year. It sits in a warehouse. It comes back as a claim against the trade terms. It turns up in a bin in May at a price that quietly tells the customer what the brand is worth.

Print short and the trade runs dry in the second week, which in a month this concentrated costs the category most of its year.

And the pack is the only piece of Ramadan advertising that cannot be paused. The film can be pulled. The media can be re-phased on a Thursday afternoon. The creator can be stood down. The pack is already on a truck.

Which is the strange part. The most irreversible advertising a brand will run this year is the pack, and the decision that sets how much of it exists is taken on a printer's minimum and a sell-in sheet, by people for whom it is a cost line.