The buyer decides November

The meeting that decides the November campaign happens in September, and nobody in it is talking about the campaign.

It is the last stock sign-off. In a direct-to-consumer business somebody signs a purchase order this month for what will be in the warehouse in November, because the factory and the sea both need the weeks and the peak does not move. After that signature the November plan is fixed. Nobody calls it the plan. They call it the buy.

Marketing is rarely in the room. Marketing is briefed six weeks later and asked for a campaign. The campaign gets built around a hero, the product the creative sells best, and a discount line, the product that clears.

Then November arrives and the hero sells out in the first week. The ads keep running, because nobody switches off the best creative of the year, and every click lands on a page that says notify me. The warehouse, meanwhile, is full of the discount line, ordered deep because it was cheap, and by the third week the whole account is being pointed at it to move the stock, at a margin nobody in marketing would have chosen.

Running several brands at once teaches you where this goes wrong, and it is never in November. The hero was under-ordered in September by a buyer working from last year's sales, in which the hero was new and had barely sold. The discount line was over-ordered by the same spreadsheet, in which it had sold well, at a discount.

What marketing is hired to do in November was set by a purchase order in September that nobody in marketing read.

The most important marketing meeting of the quarter has no marketer in it. The fix is to be in the room when the buy is placed, not when the campaign is briefed.