For a couple of summers, our Montreal cousin, Mike, had been coming to Prince Edward Island with increasingly large quantities of marijuana. The marijuana he had brought in previous years was Colombian and it had developed a good reputation among the people buying it.

One summer, however, things were different.

Whether because of planning, availability or some other reason, our cousin didn’t have his usual supply to bring with him from Montreal. Instead, he arrived with about two pounds of marijuana that had been grown in Quebec. “Homegrown”, it would normally be called.

There was nothing particularly special about it. Reggie recognized that fairly quickly. As far as he was concerned, it was ordinary, low-grade homegrown marijuana—not much different from marijuana that could have been grown on PEI.

That presented a problem.

People remembered what our cousin had brought in previous summers. When word got around that he was back with another supply, expectations were already high.

Quebecois

Then Reggie had an idea. Instead of describing it as Quebec homegrown marijuana, he gave it a name:

“Quebecois.”

An ordinary batch of homegrown marijuana suddenly sounded like something new and exotic.

But Reggie didn’t just give it a better name. As I remember it, he also priced the Quebecois at roughly 50 percent more than ordinary marijuana was selling for at the time.

And people bought it.

Soon, people were talking about how good the new Quebecois was. The marijuana itself hadn’t changed. What had changed was the way people perceived it.

The name gave it an identity. The higher price may even have reinforced the impression that it was something special. Before long, an otherwise unremarkable product had acquired a reputation of its own.

And it sold out.

Reggie the Marketer

Looking back, this story has always struck me as an example of an ability Reggie might have put to very different use.

He had taken what he himself considered a pretty poor commodity product, given it a memorable name, positioned it as something different, charged substantially more for it, created demand—and sold the entire supply.

Today we would recognize much of that as marketing and branding.

At the time, I doubt Reggie had ever learned those terms in that sense. He simply seemed to understand instinctively that what people believed about something could influence how they experienced it.

There was nothing remarkable about the marijuana.

“Quebecois” was the product Reggie created.

It is one of those stories that makes me wonder what he might have done with some of his abilities if his life had gone in a different direction.