Time Pass - a need or a brand?

If you have ever lived in Bombay (Mumbai), you would have travelled in the crowded trains bracing yourself for the one hour or more journey to the station nearest to your home. Other than the real regulars who corner the best seats to play cards or have formed a group of common interest - be it talking about the share market ups and downs of the day, for others it is one of patient waiting. Suddenly, you will hear a vendor shouting 'time pass, time pass, {product that he is selling, e.g. peanuts}, time pass'. The product could almost be anything - a puzzle, something to eat or do. But the real marketing insight that this group of vendors had was that they took a colloquial term for doing nothing of substance and used it to label the boring hour that you had to spend - literally pass time until you reached your destination. They named your need and offered something to fill it. Brilliant! I really don't know what to label it as - a need category or a genericised brand (ala 'fridge' or 'kleenex') except here you could substitute almost anything. If you really want to learn marketing and marvel at business acumen, look around you and they will be aplenty, like the ones on the downtown restauranteurs or the youngster with the scissors and glue that I wrote about earlier. They all executed flawlessly on the marketing process - observing their customers, intuiting what they need and then filling the need. If you are aspiring to be a marketer par excellence, that's what you need to do.