The price that makes the news

In the weeks before the fasting month, the price of dried fruit and nuts becomes news in Egypt.

Not a campaign and not a category report. News. A number per kilo, on television and in the papers and in every family group, set against what the same kilo cost last year, with a queue behind it and a trader explaining why.

No brand in that category could buy that much coverage. None of it belongs to them.

I have priced brands in a market where the cost moved under the pack every few months, and here is what free attention does: it arrives with its subject already chosen. The shopper is not being told about quality this year, or where the apricots came from, or what is different about the box. They are being handed a number and invited to feel something about it, and what they feel is that they should buy before it moves again.

That feeling is doing the selling. It fills the shop, and it fills it with people comparing one figure.

Which is why the marketing decision in a category like this one is not made in the brief. It is made in a pricing meeting in January, weeks before anybody writes a word, and the only question worth arguing about is which side of the public number the pack lands on. Above it, the brand is contradicting a headline. Below it, the brand is the answer to a question the shopper has already been asked by somebody else.

Where the price is published before the month begins, the price is the advertising. The brand that priced for the headline had bought the shelf before the shopper reached it.