The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-03-26

the hands of the ultimate consumer That tap is the retail sales person behind the counter.
 Experiments made recently have shown us Qn the case of our expert ments at least) that this tap is just 45 per cent open today; that 55 out of 100 sales made by advertising are killed by salespeople. Advertising seldom sells goods Advertising does not sell goods except in the case of the great mail order houses, perhaps. and the companies that deal directly with the customer. All that advertis- ing may do for most of us Is to bring customers into stores where salespeo- pie may either sell them goods or kill the sales. as they did in 55 per cent of the cases of our test.
 Tn a recent issue of the Saturday Evening Post noticed story apout the great department stores of the country In which mention was made of one store wishing to know how many people 1t had to handle on It's main floor In the course of a day. It put checkers at the doors and dis covered that 200. 900 people passed Into that store in one day That same article mentioned that 60,000 individual sales were made that day an enormous volume of sales-but the striking point was the fact that 140. 900 people had walked out of that store without buying.
 Seventy per cent of the chances to sell offered to the salespeople in that store were rejected. and the potential customers came out without buying. for A larger percentage of pure Showcase shoppers" in a de- partment store, the example checks up our experience that 55 out of 100 potential customers. brought in as a result of advertising, go out with out buying. And when speak of ad- yertising l mean local advertising of all types just as much as national ad- vertlsing.
 The success or failure of advertis- ing conducted by a local store de- bends as much upon the sales ability of the salepeople as does the success of any of the great advertising cam paigns. Advertising brings customers in to buy the goods from salespeople. and yet we have done little on na- tionw wide scale to help them to be- come better salespeople and so over come this present increased resist ance to the buying impulse on the part of our buying public: and also to help us take advantage to the ful,-
 
 Using.
 It Is true that the great stores to- day are putting In educational de- partments. They have educational di- rectors who go into each department { of the store and take little groups of employees at time and instruct them definitely in the best possible way to overcome sales resistance; but comparatively, has been done for the smaller stores In the large cities and for the stores in the smaller cities; and yet the Agrlcul- tural Publishers association assures us. as Q result of very careful inves- tigation that 52 per cent of all mer- chandise sold in America is sold in towns of less than 25,000 population.
 Hypothetical Campaigns
 Let us consider this whole thing from the angle of the advertiser, na- tional and local, In hypothetical na- tional advertising campaigns. We will start right from the ground and see how a man becomes national advertiser today and what happens to him after he has become a national advertiser. To illustrate. we will take the case of manufacturer who has never been interested in selling be- fore. He himself has no interest in selling because the entire product of his factory is taken by one or, at the most, by some half dozen great customers.
 There are thousands of such con cerns in New England alone whose entire product for two or three gen erations has been taken up by a small group of wholesalers or job ping houses. Now we get an adver- Using agency on the sopt to talk to such manufacturer about the idea of becoming a national advertiser, trade marking his product and ere ating a demand for it. He asks, Why should I? I sell my entire product today, why should I add the cost of national advertising and ap- parently get nothing out of it?" It seems fairly conclusive, doesn't it? But, the answer would be, Could you not increase the production of your plant if you had greater demand for your goods?" Why, yes, of course" the manufacturer says. Tn fact we have increased 10 per cent Well, on the other hand, is 1t not true that no circle of jobbers or wholesalers is going to beg you 10 double the capacity of your plant to enable them to buy the products which they can get from any one of 200 or 300 other manufacturers, each of Hhom is producing a similar prod uct? They will take what you have and get the remainder from the rest of them. If your merchandise were known b. name to the buying public and if people went to stores and said they wanted that certain product, the retailer could get it from the jobber and the Jobber from the wholesaler who can get it only from you, be- cause you are the only man in Amer ica that has a right to put the name on that article. Only by national can you hope to center demand upon the name on your merchandise so that your pro- duction will have to be multiplied many times to keep up with the de- mand." Then the manufacturer may say. Suppose we become national ad- vertisers. Which enc of our products shall we select as the center of our 
 Obviously you can't concentrate na- tional advertising upon fifty differ ent things, because the public mind is not immediately receptive to an entire chain of products. Having driven one product home in the pub lie mind we may then take up others and say Made by the maker of the ST." O. some other similar tie-up of that kind.
 We will take the case of manu- facturer of brushes from brooms to and whose entire prod uct has been marketed to a small sroup Of wholesalers. He decides to become a national advertiser and picks one of his products upon which to base the national advertising cam paign. How shall he pick product for a national advertising campaign The one key note is to pick the
 roduct with the widest potential de- mand, product everybody can use md everybody can afford. If we are