The clause the distributor trusts

A brand that wants shelf in a city it has never sold in buys that shelf with a clause, not a campaign.

I managed brands in Egypt, and the thing that took me longest to accept is that the trade does not trust brands. It trusts terms.

The distributor does not believe the forecast. He has been handed forecasts before. He does not believe the advertising, which he will never see, because he is not in the audience it was bought for. He does not believe the brand manager either, who is the third one he has met in four years and will have moved on before the stock does.

What he believes is the sentence about what happens to the cases that do not sell. If they come back, he can say yes to a listing in a district where nobody has asked for the product. If they do not, every case on that order is his money, standing still on his floor, in a country where money standing still loses value while it waits.

That clause is where the negotiation actually is, and it is not free. The brand that grants it pays for it: a thinner margin, a forecast that now has to be honest, and a warehouse that will take some of it back in three months and move it at whatever it can get.

The brand that refuses pays the same amount somewhere harder to see. A smaller first order. Only the pack he already knows. A listing in the districts where the name was familiar anyway, which is the definition of not entering a new city.

Media buys attention in a market. The clause buys the shelf the attention has to land on, and nobody in a warehouse has ever trusted an advertisement.