14/08/2026
A bestseller stocks out mid-Diwali-sale. The marketing team gets blamed for driving too much traffic to a limited-stock product. The real issue was almost never marketing — it was demand forecasting that didn't account for festive-specific buying patterns.
This mistake is common because ad spend planning and inventory planning are usually owned by different teams, on different timelines, with different levels of festive-specific rigor.
We asked one of our account managers what she tells new brands before their first big sale. "I always tell them — your ad calendar is locked to the day. Is your inventory forecast that specific? Most brands can tell me exactly when a campaign goes live. Very few can tell me exactly how much stock will be available for that SKU on that date, in that city."
The fix: treat inventory forecasting with the same specificity as campaign planning — SKU-level, city-level, date-specific — not a single national estimate that ignores regional demand variance.
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