Summer's first price rise

The first price rise of the summer is not charged by a brand.

From about now the air conditioning in a Cairo flat and in a Riyadh villa stops being an occasional thing and becomes the condition the household lives in. It runs through the afternoon. Then it runs through the night, and it runs in every room anybody is sitting in. The meter is the only part of the house keeping a record.

By July the electricity bill in a great many homes across this region is one of the largest variable lines the household has, and it is bigger than most of the categories being planned against it. Nobody experiences it as a purchase. Nobody decides to buy it. It arrives, it is paid, and what it takes came out of the same money every brand was competing for.

So the summer campaign meets a customer whose summer has already been partly spent. Not on a holiday and not on a competitor. On the temperature.

I have watched teams model this season as an absence: who left, who stayed, how much demand walked onto a plane. That is one half of it. The other half never leaves the postcode, orders the same way it always did, and has less room in the month than it had in April, for a reason no panel puts a question on.

It changes what a summer offer has to be. A discount on a treat is arguing with a bill that cannot be declined, and it loses. What travels is a purchase the household was going to make anyway, brought forward or made larger now, in the weeks before the meter starts taking its share.

The season does not open when the schools do. It opens when the machines come on.