The promise in the bag

Around this time of year the posters are everywhere in Cairo. Long tables, families laughing, warm light, a restaurant's name along the bottom. They are lovely.

Then the order arrives well after sunset, the soup has leaked through the bag, and one of the dishes is missing. The family eats what is there and remembers the bag, not the poster.

A logo is a flag. It tells you whose it is. The brand is something else: what people expect to happen when they deal with you, and how much patience they will give you the next time it goes wrong.

Some marketers make adverts and offers. Hand them a product and they will make it look good. That is a real skill, and it is not the job.

The other kind knows that in the end what people go through becomes the story, and the story has to hold up. So most of the work is not in the poster at all. It is in arguing, every day, for the thing in the bag to deserve the picture. No corners cut on the packaging. Nothing sent out that the person who wrote the advert would be embarrassed to receive at their own door.

That argument is unglamorous, and it is rarely won once. It has to be made again every busy evening, when the easy option is to let it slide.

The person who makes the promise is the obvious one to guard it. If not them, then who?