There is a man who walks my street most mornings. He carries his goods on his head. No shop, no signage, no logo. Just him, the sun, and whatever he has decided to sell that week. Some mornings, it is phone chargers. Some mornings, it is cooking oil in small sachets. Once it was umbrellas, the week before the rains came, which is either good timing or good instinct. Probably both.
What he does not do is tell you what he is selling.
He tells you what your life would look like if you bought it.
Not “I have phone chargers.” It is “your phone will not die on you today.” Not “cooking oil, fresh stock.” It is “your soup will be ready before your husband gets home.” The product is almost beside the point. What he is selling, always, is the version of your day that goes better because you stopped and paid attention to him.
I have sat in marketing meetings that lasted three hours, but did not communicate half as much.
There is a concept that gets taught in business schools called the “jobs to be done” framework. The idea is simple: people do not buy products. They hire them to do a job in their lives. A person does not buy a drill because they want a drill. They buy it because they want a hole in the wall. They buy it because they want the painting hung. They buy it because they want the house to feel like home.
The framework has a name, a body of research, professors who have written books about it, and courses you can pay a lot of money to take.
The man walking my street never heard of it.
He has just been practising it every single morning because his livelihood depends on getting it right.
That is the thing about informal sellers that formal businesses keep missing.
They cannot afford to be vague. There is no awareness campaign, no brand recall study, no “we are playing the long game.” There is just this moment, this person walking past, this window of maybe four seconds before they are gone. Every word has to earn its place. Everything that does not move you toward yes gets cut, not in a brand review meeting six weeks later, but in real time, on the street, because it did not work yesterday.
That pressure produces clarity. The kind of clarity that most marketing teams spend entire quarters trying to manufacture.
The outcome-first pitch is not a technique the informal seller learned. It is what survived. Everything else got left behind because it did not convert.
There is something else they do that I find even harder to teach in a boardroom.
The local medicine sellers. The ones who set up at the roadside or appear at markets with their remedies, their roots, their preparations. They do not just tell you what the product does; they show you how it is made. Right there. The leaves, the bark, the proportions, the process. They walk you through all of it out loud, in public, to anyone who will stop and watch. Check TikTok lately. There are so many of them there.
And then at the end, they say: If you cannot find these ingredients yourself, I have them. If you do not have time to prepare it, I have it ready.
Think about what that move is doing.
It is the opposite of what most formal brands are taught to do. Protect the formula. Guard the process. Never show too much. The thinking is that if you give people everything, they will not need you.
But the medicine seller knows something more true than that. Showing you everything is not a risk. It is the proof. It says: I am so certain of what this does, I will teach you to make it yourself. The demonstration is the pitch. The transparency is the trust. And the trust is what closes the sale.
Because here is what they understand that the boardroom keeps forgetting: people are not really going to make it themselves. Life does not work that way. They are busy. The ingredients are scattered. The preparation is unfamiliar. What the demonstration does is not give the product away. It removes every remaining doubt.
By the time they say “contact me if you cannot find the ingredients,” you already believe in the product completely. Because you just watched someone who clearly believes in it more than anyone paid to sell it ever could.
That is a level of marketing confidence that most formal brands cannot get to. Not because they lack the product. But because they do not trust it enough, or their customer enough, to show everything and still believe the sale will come.
I think about this when I sit with campaign briefs.
We spend a lot of time describing the product. Its features, its qualities, what makes it different from the last version of itself. We talk about what it is before we ever get to what it does for you. And even then, what it does is often written in the language of the brand rather than the language of the person standing in the heat deciding whether to stop walking or keep going.
We build personas. We run focus groups. We brief agencies. We review copy, revise it, align it with the brand voice, get it signed off, and send it out into the world, hoping it lands.
The man on my street does all of that in four seconds. In his head. While balancing things on it.
I am not saying throw out the strategy. I am not saying informal is always better than structured. There are things that scaling requires that a street seller does not need to worry about.
But I am saying that somewhere between the brief and the final approved copy, something often gets lost. The human being on the other end. The specific moment in their day that your product is supposed to improve. The outcome they are actually trying to get to.
They remember that. We keep forgetting it.
We optimise for impressions. They optimise for the sale.
One of those is a business metric. The other is a conversation with a real person about their real life.
The best marketing has always been the second one. We just built enough infrastructure around it that we sometimes forget which one actually matters.
