The shelf fills before the moon

For a grocery brand, Ramadan is happening this fortnight.

Not in March. Now, in a distributor's warehouse and on a retailer's order sheet.

The month is expected to begin around the start of March, depending on the sighting, and everything that decides the outcome sits before it. The listing was argued over before the new year. The order was signed in January. The lorries are moving now. The pallet at the end of the aisle, the dates, the drinks, the cooking oil, the sugar in the bigger bag, goes down well before the first night, because no supermarket can build a Ramadan aisle on the morning of a sighting.

So by the time the first film runs, the volume is set. Whatever the trade took is what the market has. If the buyer took less than last year, no amount of advertising will sell more than he took, because the rest is not in the country.

I managed brands through this, and the part that is easiest to get wrong is who the advertising is for.

The shopper is the audience. The trade is the customer, and the trade has already paid.

A buyer gave you the end of an aisle instead of giving it to somebody else. He did that on a promise: the film would be on the biggest screens, the price would be in the leaflet, a sampling table would be in his store on a Thursday evening. From the first week of the month he is checking whether the promise arrived, and not to be difficult: he has to place the same order next year, and by then his own management will have asked him why he backed you.

The shelf fills before the moon is seen. A Ramadan campaign looks like demand creation, and for a good part of its budget it is a promise being kept in public, to a man who signed in January.