Red Hat: How my dad, an immigrant laborer, taught me my first lesson in marketing
Thanks for taking the pic, Mom. This was at the end of the day at Six Flags. My dad was showing us a fish he caught days earlier that he was getting ready to clean in the outdoor sink.
Whenever I think about an oversaturated market and how to stand out, I always go back to something my dad, or Papa, did for me when I was a little kid.
When I was about six years old, my parents took me, my brother Joe, and my cousin Rick to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ. I didn’t realize it at the time, but something that happened there sticks with me better than most lessons I learned in school.
Jackson was about an hour or so away from Newark, and we’d leave at some time like 7am to make sure we didn’t hit all of the lines, with packed lunch to avoid even more lines and dumb expensive hotdogs (even though we wanted them way more than the Spanish ham “sanweeshes” my dad loved). After a long day of kiddie rides and being consoled by Sylvester from Looney Toons (I don’t remember why I was crying), we stopped to attend some sort of sit-down show. They had dolphin shows, motorboat zippy things, a batman show I think, but the one we went to was different.
Looked something like that, minus the shaky lines.
The show we went to had a guy on stage with a bunch of cans, sort of looked like Pringles, on stage in a big line. What he told the crowd, prob 100 people or so, was that there was a prize in one of them, and in the rest, a giant stuffed snake would pop out. I’d say there were like 8 cans on the stage.
Now, he asked the audience if anyone wanted to come up and try their luck picking the winning can. We were sitting farther back, and I was waving my arm like a lunatic. He didn’t call on me for the first few attempts, which every kid had lost so far.
After seeing me waving my arm like crazy, my dad grabs me and says, “HEY! TAKE THIS, STAND UP HERE, AND WAVE!” as he lifts me unto the bench and takes my red baseball cap off my head and puts in my hand. Without missing a beat, the guy on stage goes, “You, with the red hat, come on up!”
I lost and got scared by a dumb stuffed snake. Even though I lost, I only remember this story because of how quickly I was picked after making that slight adjustment to what would get me noticed. I try to now find the red hat in any scenario that I’m struggling with in marketing and getting noticed by any audience. It’s not always as simple as a red hat, but there’s always something that can help you stand out when you need to.
P.S. - When I done picking the losing can, the host asked me where I was from. I said, “America” and the crowd laughed. I got confused about why they laughed at a true statement, and stormed off the stage, haha.