Marketing 101 - Have a Gimmick

October 10, 2008 by admin.

In Laos one day I saw this street vendor selling chances to win kitchen items. The interesting part was that the whole operation was mounted on a pole that the vendor carried around the streets. There was the punchboard, a pole, and the prizes hanging from the pole.

The punchboard was purchased by the street vendor from some local guy that made them. The lowest prize was a piece of candy and the biggest prize was an aluminum cooking pot. The intermediate prizes were kitchen and household items that were useful in daily life for the average Laotian. All the prizes were individually tied in plastic bags and hung on this wooden pole by plastic string. The punchboard tickets looked like Wrigley’s spearmint gum wrappers, shiny on one side and had a number from 1 to 50, and stapled to the cardboard punchboard. Each number corresponded to a number in a plastic bag with a prize.  It truly was gambling because 10 Kip back then was a lot of money, just to win a piece of candy. The zonk prize basically as Lets Make a Deal would say.

But I had several marketing gimmicks going for me. One was location, location, location. Our first house in Laos was on a main road to the morning market. The morning market was the central place where most commerce in Vientiane took place. So I caught the shoppers with money on the way in to the market. The other gimmick I had was I was an American and we were perceived by the locals as super rich, which by their standards we were. I think at the time the annual salary of a male Laotian was like $200.

I would stand out from front and yell CHA LOCK SIP KIP !

Boy did I get a crowd of curious shoppers each day.

Sip being 10. The rest meant take a chance for 10 Kip !

The novelty of an American kid selling chances was just too much for the locals. After a few weeks of standing in front of this huge French colonial house and hawking my wares, I sold out all my tickets, paid back my Dad the initial front money for the whole setup, and dreamed of other conquests.

We Americans had big noses compared to the Laotians, so they called us, VALANG DANG MO, which ruffly translated, French have big nose. The French were in Laos the previous decade to us being there, and as far as the locals were concerned, we all looked alike with our big noses, I bet you most locals had no idea the French had left and the Americas were there.

P.S. Actually I used the profits to buy the ingredients to make more smoke bombs, but that is another story :}

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