The calendar on the wall

Yesterday was Diwali. In Dubai it was a season, and on most regional marketing calendars I have seen it was a blank. The gap between those two facts is a headcount.

A marketing calendar looks like a neutral document, as though it came from the world. It came from a room, and it lists the days the people in that room keep at home.

Put a team of Saudis and British expatriates in a Riyadh office and the calendar will carry National Day, Founding Day, Ramadan, the two Eids, Christmas and the January sale. It will not carry Diwali, because nobody in the room bought gold last week. It will not carry Coptic Christmas on the seventh of January, a public holiday in Egypt and a season in Cairo, because nobody in the room keeps it. It will have one back-to-school date rather than three, because the parent who knows the international schools are on a break around now was not in the room, or was not asked.

Now sit on the other side of the desk. Somewhere in that office yesterday a colleague was at home with family, on a day that mattered to much of the city the plan was written for. They had watched the calendar being built. The day was not on it. They said nothing, because the calendar looked finished, and a junior person does not correct a finished document about their own religion in front of a room.

The blank on the plan is exactly the shape of who was not asked.

So the fix is not a better calendar. Every attempt I have seen to buy one, an almanac, a consultant, an agency's festive planner, produces a longer list just as blind at the edges, because it was still written in one room. The fix is a different room.

A calendar is a headcount document. Change the calendar and you have changed a spreadsheet. Change the room and the calendar changes itself.