The day shortens by law

The month is expected to begin tomorrow or on Thursday, depending on the sighting, and the change nobody writes into a marketing plan is the one that happens by law.

Private-sector working hours in Saudi Arabia come down to six a day for the month. That is statute, not custom. Across the Gulf the same reduction arrives in one form or another, with offices opening later and emptying earlier. In Cairo the government day gets shortened by announcement, and everything that runs on it shortens too.

So before a single consumer has changed a single habit, the working day of the region gets a quarter shorter, and more than that in practice.

Every plan I have seen is ready for the other change. The inverted day, the dead morning, the hours after the table is cleared. Almost none of them mentions the office, because an office is not a consumer and does not appear in a media plan.

A great deal of the region's ordinary trade is an office, though. The lunch place in the business district with a queue at one. The coffee cart that does two hundred cups before eleven. The catering business whose entire year is meetings with sandwiches on the table. The service that needs a signature from a person who is now in the building for six hours. The call that needed two cities awake at once and now has a window of about ninety minutes.

None of these think of themselves as seasonal. They have no campaign to switch on, and no reason to expect a month famous for selling more of everything to take a quarter of their week away.

The customer's day inverts, and that is in every plan. The working day shortens by law, and it is in none of them.