The offer you filed

The autumn offer in Saudi Arabia is being written this week, in the emptiest fortnight of the year, by people who cannot yet see what anybody else is going to do.

That is not a planning preference. A promotion here is licensed. The products, the discount, the branches and the dates go on an application, the licence comes back with those details on it, it hangs where a customer can read it, and an inspector can check the shelf against the paper. The applications for next month's National Day go in now.

Which quietly removes the move that most of the world's promotional playbooks are built around.

Elsewhere the offer is an opening position. You start at twenty per cent, a competitor goes to thirty on the Thursday, and by Sunday you are at thirty-five with a week added. Everybody knows the game is played that way, so everybody holds something back to play it with.

Here the number was decided in August and the dates sit on a document with a stamp on it. Going deeper is a new application. The week you would have extended into is the week you needed the answer.

So the competitive response has to be something else, and there is one place left to look. The hours. Who is standing on the floor on a Thursday night. Whether the delivery promise holds when the volume triples. What the room looks like at nine, when the family finally arrives.

None of it is margin. All of it is what the customer actually experiences, and none of it can be read off a rival's poster.

The licence takes the discount out of the argument in August. What is left to compete with is the operation, which is slower to move and still standing in January.