The most remarkable marketing guy is operating out of a shanty bar across the road from the famous Mullins Beach Bar (now called Mannie’s Suga Suga) which is
a kilometre or two south of Speightstown on the west coastal road of Barbados.
He calls himself Breeze.
Mr Breeze, which is what I called him last week, not wishing to appear over-familiar, sells jewellery, some of which is made out of the berries of the island’s flora.
Some of that flora is fairly unique, and some is in short and in diminishing supply.
His stuff is good. It’s attractive. You want to buy it.
But Mr Breeze will not let you, the customer, close the sale until he, the vendor, has finished his marketing pitch.
He’s that much of marketing man. For Mr Breeze it’s the presentation that counts, not the sale. Mr Breeze is a marketing man’s marketing man.
My own thought was: buy the stuff, buy him a drink, and let’s settle down to a bottle or three of Banks’ excellent beer and a chin-wag.
“Not yet”, said Mr Breeze, “with a slow wave of the hand, “not yet.”
And it was worth waiting for. By the end of the presentation. Mr Breeze had come up with two punchy, Madison Ave.-style, marketing slogans.
The first was: ‘It’s cool as ice, and twice as nice, for half the price, in Paradise.’
Pretty neat, eh?
If that didn’t do the trick he hit potential punters with the unanswerable follow-up:
‘It’s one hundred million, billion, trillion, zillion per cent Bajan.’
Clever stuff. No one wants to be thought anti-Bajan.
Leave a comment