The warehouse writes the offer

The document that decides a November offer is a stock report, and it arrives before the brief.

Every in-house team I have sat in runs the same week ahead of 11.11. The peak stock has landed, the warehouse is full, and someone in planning sends round a sheet of the lines carrying too many weeks of cover. By the end of the week that sheet is the sale.

Nobody describes it that way. The meeting talks about hero products and what the customer has been waiting for. But when the depths are set, the fifty per cent goes on the line a buyer over-ordered in April, the thirty on the colourway that stalled in summer, and the ten on the thing people actually want. Lay the offer next to the stock report and they match, line for line. The depth is weeks of cover, written as a price.

The customer does not know this. They see fifty per cent and take it as a statement about the product. It is one. It says the product was bought in the wrong quantity, and the price is now whatever it takes to make that quantity leave the building.

This is sunk cost with a media budget behind it. The stock was paid for in spring, and that money is gone whether the boxes sit there or not. The honest question is what the line is worth to a customer today, and at what price. The question the room answers instead is how to make the spring decision look less bad by the end of the year.

The distance between those two questions is the margin, and the discount hands it to the customer for doing the warehouse a favour.

That is the part I try to say plainly in the room. The customer is not being rewarded. They are being paid, in margin, to fix somebody's purchase order, and the purchase order is doing the pricing.