The other festive season

Tomorrow is Diwali, and in Dubai you can tell without a calendar. The jewellers have been full for a week. The sweet shops have a queue and have opened a second counter. The restaurants that matter to much of the city were booked out for tomorrow night weeks ago, and the flower sellers in Bur Dubai and Karama have been busy since Friday.

Gold is bought this week as an act, not an accessory. Clothes are new for the day. Gifts move between households on a scale December would recognise, and the household buying them will also buy a school uniform, a sofa and a car this year.

Now look at where the regional plan for this quarter was written. If it came from London, the festive season starts in November and ends at Christmas. If it came from Riyadh, the fourth quarter is National Day just gone, the promotional month ahead and Ramadan already being bought. Neither calendar has the twentieth of October on it. Neither is wrong about its own city. Both are blind to the same day, one of the biggest retail moments of the year in the region's retail capital.

So the plan lands in Dubai with a blank where a season should be. The blank gets filled anyway, by the local jeweller, the sweet shop and the restaurant, who never needed a regional plan to know which week the gold sells. The regional brand is simply absent from a week in which its own customer is spending.

When a playbook crosses a border, what breaks is usually described as a cultural slip. A greeting on the wrong day, a colour used badly, a caption clearly written somewhere else. That is the small version, and it is cheap.

The large version is this. Flattening the Gulf into one festive calendar is not a tone error. It is a whole season with money in it, and nobody briefed it.