Selling Forces
A house book the Curtis Publishing Company issued in 1913 for manufacturers who know little about national advertising.
What it is
A house book the Curtis Publishing Company issued in 1913 for manufacturers who know little about national advertising. Part One makes the case for the category. It opens with the Barrett Specification, a $12,000 campaign that advertised a standard method for laying tar and gravel roofs instead of a product, and grew to a quarter of a million dollars a year. Later chapters cover the agent, the consumer, the retailer and the jobber. The Results chapter lists six effects of advertising and works the overhead arithmetic: doubling output from 10,000 to 20,000 pieces cuts overhead per piece from $1.00 to fifty cents. Another chapter answers standard objections one by one, such as a narrow margin or orders already full. Part Two sells space in The Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and The Country Gentleman, and ends with the Philadelphia plant.
Why read it now
This is a model for selling a category before selling yourself. Curtis argues from other firms' cases (Utica pliers, Nemo Corsets, Welch's grape juice) and pitches its own magazines only in Part Two. Several claims still hold. Continuity: a campaign stopped after a year or two loses the impression it built, and Ehrenberg-Bass studies of brands that go dark report the same slow decline. Memory built before the purchase: the girl who sees Gold Medal Flour ads years before she orders groceries is what research now calls mental availability. Quality first: advertising makes a poor product's faults conspicuous faster. The Commercial Research Division the book describes is usually named as the start of corporate market research. What has dated: the unit-cost savings are asserted, not measured; the chapters on women and farmers lean on period stereotypes; and the promise that results follow circulation as the tide follows the moon is sales copy. Use: before pitching a service your buyers doubt, write the category case with third-party proof, then list their standard objections and answer each.
Passages worth keeping
The maker of dishonest products will last longer without advertising.
الإعلان يسرّع حكم الناس على المنتج، فإن كان رديئًا انكشف أسرع، وصاحبه يبقى في السوق أطول لو لم يعلن.
Ivory Soap has no monopoly of the soap business. But it has a monopoly of Ivory Soap.
الإعلان المستمر لا يمنح العلامة السوق كلها، لكنه يجعل اسمها ملكًا لها وحدها في ذهن المشتري.
The cumulative effect of advertising is so important that continuity is imperative. Its effectiveness is largely dependent upon concentration, consistency and continuity.
أثر الإعلان يتراكم مع الوقت، لذلك لا بد من الاستمرار، وقوته تأتي من التركيز والثبات والمداومة.
Taken all together the savings amount to as much as, and often more than the cost of the advertising, to say nothing of greater volume.
الوفورات في التكاليف الثابتة والمواد والعمالة والبيع قد تعادل كلفة الإعلان أو تزيد عليها، وذلك قبل احتساب زيادة المبيعات.
The public is weighing words and the balance swings toward the more solid ones.
الجمهور يزن الكلام، ويميل إلى العبارة الرصينة أكثر من المبالغة.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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