-John ‘Dare Okafor

Image Credit: Tech Cabal

We have lamented for so long, that our saliva has become a slap on our cheeks. Gradually, we are getting washed away like shells by the seashore. We won’t stop lamenting since there are still ears to listen and brains to reason. Nowadays, you get into public buses with high expectations to encounter us, but we are rarely found. Not because we no longer exist, but because people are getting wiser than they were. They are getting tired of the truths we say of our products and they take for granted, our kind gesture of always offering solutions to maladies affecting the nation. That is the reason why you must to be a part of us; we have to push this ministry of unorthodox marketing to the ends of the world, starting with Nigeria. This profession is one of the most lucrative and dignified professions any unemployed persons can opt for, even you. Yes ke. If you have a job, you won’t be seeking for what it takes to be a bus vendor. Take off your pride and put down these few points of being a Nigerian bus vendor:

Get Old Bags

As a bus vendor, you can’t make use of just any type of bag for your products; they must be old ones. Why? Using an old bag for your products shows how long you have been in the game and it commands respect whenever other vendors see you. Worn out bags like BAGCO bags, Ghana Must Go, etc. are trademarks of a bus vendor. Moreover, carrying these bags doesn’t make you look rich even, though your pockets are filled with sales money. To add to it, your products are safe in these types of bags as you can’t be easily robbed of your products by bandits.     

Be A Talkative

I can see you squeezing your face. Oh yes! I see you. You can’t be a part of this honourable calling and not be lousy. Make everyone in the bus aware of your presence; chat incessantly with every passenger in the bus, pose to them warm gestures like smiling to the hefty man with a stony face, pacifying the crying baby (because that’s a spoiler for your sales), also settle disagreements amidst passengers to show yourself as a worthy mediator. The more you do this, the more their hearts gets warmed towards your products and they won’t even  know when they dip hands into their pockets to buy from you.

Be A Persuasive Liar

When you are selling a product as a solution to a problem, your aim should always be to convince people to accept the problem that they do not have. Your goal is to sell your products, so do everything possible to convince the passengers in that bus about your product. If it means lying about how that cream cleared someone’s long affliction of pimples within five minutes, do it! If it means showing them only ten of the products as the only remaining ones available in Nigeria, do it! If it means telling them to demand their money back wherever they find you if the product doesn’t work, do it!

All Your Products Are From Overseas

The mind of the average Nigerian is a colonised one, so always make sure you don’t present your products as locally made. Talk about the years it took Indian researchers to manufacture that drug and how the company you are working for is the only licensed distributor in the world. Talk about how the drug was endorsed by WHO even when it was only produced at your backyard. Talk about how mustard seeds can only be gotten from a particular tree in Israel and how you are the Messiah sent to bring it to Nigeria. My guy, see, everything na branding. 

Related piece: How To Survive The Virtual Semester: The You-High Way

The Last Bus-stop is Your Bus-stop 

As a bus vendor, you must always utilise wisely the time you have to spend speaking and advertising your product during the journey. The moment you alight before you should, you may lose a potential customer in the bus at the brink of being convinced about what you are selling. Never have a destination in mind as a bus vendor. In fact, you should assist the bus conductor in calling out bus stops for passengers to alight as a way to evade paying for your transport fare. Sometimes, you have to follow the bus to and fro throughout the whole day to encounter different types of passengers. 

Give Imaginary Discount Prices

Make sure to always remind your customers of how they will never get the price of a product anywhere in the world at the rate at which you are selling it. Bring in the tactics of buy one, get one free, buy two, get two free. This here melt the hearts of those tight-fisted passengers who never want to let go of their money.  Let them know they may never get the opportunity to get the product at a pharmacy as you are the sole marketer in the whole of West Africa, and in case they get it, it will be at exorbitant prices. 

As a potential bus vendor, you should know by now that you are not restricted to just selling a product; your products change as the seasons in the year. You may choose to sell mustard seeds today or sell sexual enhancement drugs tomorrow, sell miracle water this month or sell pimples cream the next month. I hope this has been helpful in weighing the decision between if you will cope being a bus vendor or not.