The year starts this week

The traffic is back on the ring road in Riyadh, the school run is back, and the office has more people in it than chairs. This is the week the Gulf's year starts.

January is where the fiscal year lives, and where a head office in London or New York believes the year begins. Nothing in the market believes it. The customer's year begins now, in the first week of September, when the schools reopen, depending on the school, when the households come back from the summer, and when the budgets that went quiet in July are switched back on.

Look at what lines up from here. National Day in Saudi Arabia on the twenty-third, with the licence window for its promotions falling in the middle of this month. Then the season in Riyadh, which opens in the autumn and changes the price of attention in every category until spring. Then the promotional month, which starts with 11.11 and runs to the end of November. Then December, with its own national days. Then Ramadan, expected around February depending on the sighting, briefed before anyone has finished with December.

That is the year. It runs from this week to Eid, and the quiet months are the ones the global calendar calls the start.

I have sat in the translation problem from both ends. A plan written on a January clock spends its first quarter warming up while the market is at full speed, and its third quarter at full speed while the market is on the coast. It reaches the customer late and calls the miss seasonality.

The fiscal year is where the money lives. The customer's year starts this week, and a plan written on a January clock arrives eight months late to its own market.