Bish f.ic Bese

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'distance of everybody. Do salesmen and advertising perform a function similar to the function of transportation ? Are they a necessary part of the cost of distribution?

I suppose everybody will admit, without argument, that we must employ one or the other. We couldn't manufacture an article and then sit down and wait for people in some mysterious way to discover what it is, what it will do, what it costs, and where it may be obtained. Please do not quote the mouse trap philosopher. It may be true that the world will beat a pathway to the secluded cabin of his manufacturer, but.since no mousetrap manufacturers have built their cabins in the woods-and no other manufacturers, for that matter-we must dismiss the idea. It may be true, as is implied, that the world will ultimately discover you if you turn out a product of superlative merit; but it would take a long time, and I think I could show, if necessary, that it would cost the consumer a great deal more to discover that cabin in the woods and go to it and get his mouse trap and come home again than it would to have the mouse trap brought to his door through the usual channels of distribution. which necessarilv involve cost of salesmen or advertising, or both; rent, tiansportation, insurance ,and a host of other items that don't add anything to the merit of the article, but which are just as essential as the raw material of which it is made.

In some way or other we must be informed what their product is, what it will do, what it costs, and where it may be obtained. Is it cheaper to cohvey this information to us through salesmen, or through advertising or through a mixture of the two ?

The instance just cited doesn't look as if advertising had made soup cost any more. It looks as if it had enabled saiesmen to work more effrciently and so get more out of their time and thus make the product cost just that much less.

It is true that you may pay seventeen hundredths of a cent for the most of advertising in each can of soup you buy. We must admit that the advertising, without increasing the quality of the soup, does, in a sense, make it cost more; it makes each can cost seventeen-hundredths of a cent more than it might theoretically cost if you could knorv without advertising what it was, what it does, what it costs, and where to get itr But in a truer sense the advertising makes that can of soup cost less, or enables the manufacturer to give you greater value, because under the old method the total distributing expense was about four times as much as it is at present. And it is total actual distributing expense that we must look at, not just one item of distributing expense.

Take another example in an entirely different field. The president of a large concern relates an experience in distributing brake lining for automobiles. Within three months the company opened up more than 2000 new dealer outlets for its brake lining. The work was done almost entirely through advertising

"Our cost," said this executive, "for opening up these new dealer outlets-which, of course, will be a convenience to the public which is needing more and more brake lining all the time-was about one-fifth what we would have spent to get these dealers if we had attempted to do it exclusively by sending around salesmen. This means that for us advertising is a distributing economy. It cuts our distributing cost, and we are able to pass along a proper proportion of this saving to the ultimate consumer. I am very sure that if brake lining was distributed without the assistance of advertising, we should find it necessary to raise the price to the consumer."

A men's clothing store with national distribution recently printed a chart showing the division of a clothing dollar. The total advertising expense was .0183 cents per dollar. If the judge is right, we could eliminate that .0183, which amounts to less than 6 cents on a $3 shirt, and you could get your $3 shirt for $2.95.

This concern has been in business for a very long time, and undoubtedly, if it could save the cost of the advertising, would have done so years ago.

Then

the Bottom Dropped Out

I know of one concern that did think it could save the cost of the advertising. This was the Pearline Compahy. Shortly after James Pyle, the originator of Pearline, died, the people in charge thought that the product was so well established that they need no longer do any advertising. They were at that time spending about a half. million dollars a year on advertising, and the annual profits of the business were said to be well over a million dollars. They stopped the advertising. Almost immediately the business began to fall off, but when these gentlemen realized that they had made a mistake it was too late. The entire business was sold a few years later to a competitor for about $12,000.

The vice president of one of the -larg-est m.eat-qacking corlcerns, in a recent article in "Manufacturing News,f' made the statemeflt that advertising might properly be likened to an improvement in production machinery. "The

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