The customer is not fasting

I had this the wrong way round for a long time.

I run marketing for brands whose customers live in a country with no Ramadan in it, from a desk in a city about to turn its whole day over. On Saturday the customer has a gifting weekend, with a delivery cutoff that has already passed. Then, from around the eighteenth if the sighting holds, my day inverts and the customer's does not move at all.

The risk in that arrangement, I assumed, was operational. Cover. Reply times. Two sets of public holidays on one calendar, and a Friday that is a family day here and a working day there. That part is a spreadsheet, and it gets solved once.

What I had wrong is that the risk is editorial.

A team that has not eaten since before dawn writes differently at five in the afternoon. Shorter. Flatter. More literal. In a hurry to be finished, and generous with nothing. Later in the month it goes the other way, warm and expansive, full of the register it is living inside. Neither of those is a decision anybody records. Both of them land on an ordinary Tuesday morning, in front of a customer who is not fasting, is not celebrating, and did not ask to be included in anything.

The tell is in the copy rather than the rota. Writing done in a fasting building carries a mood, and the mood belongs to the building.

The operator's calendar is not the market's, and the mistakes that follow are not made in the hours the team is asleep. They are made in the hours the building is most awake, when everybody is certain and nobody in the room is the customer.