The September wallet

For years I planned Egypt's September as a back-to-school month, and I had it wrong.

The calendar said so. The public schools open around the second half of the month, the stationery aisles fill through August, and the plan followed: a back-to-school theme, a family pack, a promotion timed to the first day. It was the obvious thing, and it is what most brands still do.

What the calendar does not show is the wallet.

September in Egypt is the month after the coast. The household has just come back from weeks on the North Coast, where every price carried a summer premium. The summer has been paid for, sometimes borrowed against. Then the fees arrive, for the school, the uniform, the books, the bus, all in the same fortnight. The wallet that meets a September promotion is the emptiest it will be all year.

That is why the small packs move in September. Not because anyone wants less, but because the household is buying by the day again, a few pounds at a time, until the month turns. And it is why a price rise that lands in September lands worst. The customer has no room to absorb it, a number in their head from June, and a competitor on the same shelf who kept the small pack at the old price.

I managed brands through this and read the September dip as a category problem, or a competitor, or the promotion being wrong. It was none of those. The household had simply run out of month.

So the plan for the last third of the year in Egypt starts somewhere other than the school calendar: from what the household has left in the third week of September, what it will have again by November, and which pack meets each of those moments at a price the wallet can say yes to.

In Egypt the season is not a date. It is a balance.