The distributor's September

The fourth-quarter plan for an Egyptian FMCG brand is being finished about now, in a Cairo office, in a template with a row for every month. It will be presented in September. Then it will be handed to a man with a warehouse in Mansoura who has never seen the template and measures his year in cases.

I managed brands in Egypt, and it took me longer than it should have to sit on his side of the desk.

From that side the plan looks different. The launch is a new line he has to find shelf for in a kiosk the size of a wardrobe, where every facing already belongs to something that sells. The new pack is the old pack with a different case count, so his van loads differently and his rep's order sheet is wrong for a fortnight. The price move is the week three hundred small retailers ask his rep why, and the rep answers with whatever he was told in a voice note the night before. The promotion is stock he has to carry now and be paid for later.

None of it is aimed at him. All of it arrives as a problem for his target, and his target is cases, this month, out of the door.

So he does what anyone with a target does. He loads what moves. The pack the kiosk owner already knows, at the price the retailer has already accepted. The launch goes into the van last, to the outlets that will not argue. The plan gets executed in exactly the order the plan did not intend.

The brand manager who has not sat in that van on a September morning, watching which cases come off first, has planned for a country that does not exist. The one that exists has a rep, a route, a target and a kiosk with no room. The plan is what the van carries.