Many Lessons in Business from the Prickly Pear Seller!

My love for prickly pears increases every summer, and I crave them even more when they are cold and delicious… who doesn’t love prickly pears!

When I was buying prickly pears this year, I found myself looking at the seller differently—these sellers are a school from which we can learn a lot about business.

Packaging prickly pears in foam trays, like in the picture, has been appearing for a few years and became very popular this year. It’s a nice move—you can stop by in your car and get the ready-to-eat tray without waiting, and it’s much easier to eat while driving.

What does this have to do with business?

We learn that you should improve your product, even if it’s just the way it’s presented to the customer. You’ll find the prickly pear seller standing in the same spot from the start to the end of the season without moving, so his regular customers can find him. This man instinctively understands marketing and the importance of location in the basics of marketing and distribution.

A seller’s choice of location is like a school of marketing, each instinctively based on a marketing principle. You’ll find some standing on a busy street corner, near a bus stop, next to a sugarcane seller, koshary vendor, corn seller, or lupine seller. They operate according to an important marketing principle:

Think like your customer—when might they need your product? Be on your customer’s daily path. This is what we see in large markets in how products are displayed. Be near complementary products.

Example: When a customer waits for grilled corn or a bus, seeing the prickly pears makes them want to buy them. Or after finishing koshary and needing something sweet, or while buying nuts for home, they remember the prickly pears.

Other prickly pear sellers stand far from all of the above. They follow a marketing principle called Share of Wallet, which simply means the customer has only one wallet. For example, a customer leaves home with 50 EGP to buy food and snacks. They might eat, then buy corn, popcorn, seeds, or prickly pears. You might find a seller standing away from corn vendors so that while at their stall, you don’t spend your money on corn and end up buying less prickly pear—or none at all.

In part two of this article, we’ll explore more lessons from prickly pear sellers and how you can apply them to your business.

This article was originally published on the Facebook page Thoughts on Business by Taher Abdel-Hameed.