The greeting from a brand

Eid in Saudi Arabia today, a day later in some places, depending on where the sighting was accepted. By now every phone in the region has received the same two words from several hundred senders, and most of them are companies.

A greeting is the only message a brand sends all year with nothing in it to sell. No offer. No code. No link to a product page. Nothing to measure, which means nothing to hide behind.

That ought to make it the easiest thing to write. It makes it the hardest. Take the discount out of a message and what is left is whether you have anything to say to this person on this day, and a great many brands find out in public, once a year, that they do not.

So the greeting gets written in February by whoever was free, approved with the campaign, scheduled, and sent at eight in the morning to the whole list at once. It lands between eleven identical others. It is read for a quarter of a second, and it spends a little of the only goodwill the brand has, because a person on Eid morning is the least commercially available they will be all year and they gave you the minute anyway.

The ones that land are always specific. They know what the morning is actually like. Who is being visited. Who is cooking again. Who has been awake since dawn with the children. Who is in a car on a road out of the city.

The test I use is whether I would send the exact line from my own number, with my own name under it, to one person I know well. If I would not, it does not go out under the brand's name either. It is not a message. It is attendance.