The office manager books December

A hotel's festive brochure is already printed. It is the second week of October, Dubai is filling up for next week's technology show, and the PDF is doing the rounds: a gala dinner, three set menus, a price per head for the office party, a deposit date in bold.

Nobody wrote it for the guest.

Look at who it is sent to. Office managers. Executive assistants. The person in a company of forty who was told, some time in September, to sort out the staff party before the good rooms go. She has a headcount, a budget per head signed off by someone who will not attend the tasting, and a boss who wants it done. She is booking a Thursday in the second week of December, and she is booking it this week, because the hotel across the road has already lost its Thursdays.

That is how a Gulf hotel's December is sold. Now, one brochure and one deposit at a time, to a buyer who is comparing three hotels on a spreadsheet and will choose the one that answered her email first.

Then, in the first week of December, the campaign goes out. Lights on the terrace, a family at a long table, a couple with the skyline behind them, copy written for a consumer choosing where to spend Christmas Eve. It is a good campaign. It is selling a room that has been full for six weeks, to a person who was never the buyer.

The seats went in October. They went to somebody whose name is on no marketing plan and who has never appeared in a persona deck, and she decides more of the hotel's festive revenue than anyone the campaign was written for.