The Drug Book
A subscription kit sold by the Charles Austin Bates Syndicate of New York in 1899 for $25, with coupons for a letter of criticism, a plan for moving from credit to cash, store rules, a year of the paper Good Advertising, and 225 printing cuts at 16 cents each.
What it is
A subscription kit sold by the Charles Austin Bates Syndicate of New York in 1899 for $25, with coupons for a letter of criticism, a plan for moving from credit to cash, store rules, a year of the paper Good Advertising, and 225 printing cuts at 16 cents each. The opening essay, How to Advertise a Drug Store, argues that the store is the first advertisement, that newspapers deserve over half the budget, and that spending should follow results. It forbids substituting for a named brand, and urges plain type, a money-back offer, and one product per window with a price card. Bates critiques real ads such as The Owl cut-rate store in Kansas City. Most of the book is numbered ready-made ads for prescriptions, soda water, hair tonic and cough cures, followed by a cut catalogue, catch-lines, and forms logging daily sales against ad cost beside last year.
Why read it now
The essay holds up better than the ads. Bates puts the store experience first and the ad second, and insists the ad never promise more than the counter delivers; review-driven retail now enforces the same rule. His loss-leader advice, cutting the price of a heavily advertised brand so buyers come in for it and buy the rest at full margin, is still standard pharmacy and grocery practice. His case for a money-back offer rests on a point that holds: few people claim refunds, and each claim shows you what is wrong. The daily log of sales against ad spend, set beside the same month last year, is a plain version of the incrementality check many marketers still skip. What has dated: the ready-made copy sells patent medicines and hair tonics with cure claims that current health-advertising rules, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, would not allow, and advice to buy more space during epidemics reads badly now. Use: keep a one-line daily record of sales and ad spend per branch, set against the same day last year, before judging any campaign.
Passages worth keeping
The best and most essential advertising is that which is done inside the store. The newspaper ad comes next.
تجربة العميل داخل المتجر هي أقوى إعلان، والإعلان المنشور يأتي بعدها ولا يعوّض عنها.
A little poison would spoil a large quantity of food. A little deceit will take the intrinsic value right out of a large quantity of good advertising.
كذبة صغيرة واحدة تكفي لإفساد أثر حملة إعلانية جيدة كلها، كما يفسد قليل من السم طعامًا كثيرًا.
The best ads are those that tell the most with the fewest words.
الإعلان الجيد يقول أكثر ما يمكن بأقل عدد من الكلمات: ما المنتج، وما فائدته، وكم سعره.
It is not likely that you will often be called upon to return any money, but your willingness to do so will have a very valuable effect continually.
طلبات استرداد المال قليلة في الواقع، لكن إعلان الاستعداد للرد يبني الثقة كل يوم.
After you have kept it carefully for a few months, you will find that it will indicate with a good deal of certainty just what your advertising is doing for you.
تسجيل المبيعات اليومية مع كلفة الإعلان لبضعة أشهر يكشف بوضوح معقول ما يضيفه الإعلان فعلًا إلى المبيعات.
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
If this library is useful, leave an email
We send new patterns, ads, and notes when we add them. Name and phone are optional.
You are on the list
We will write when we add more library material.