IT PAYS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIV, Issue 236, 12 September 1924, Page 5

IT PAYS

To Advertise AND WHY IT DOES. CHEAPER AND BETTER GOODS. (By Shaw Desmond, who shows the benefits of judicious advertisement and explodes the fallacy that the consumer pays.) The subject of this article is a most vital matter, not only for the business man. but for the public. Iwo main points stand out from the , proceedings of the International Advertising Convention, held in London, and are vouched for by business men of all types from peers to commoners who have addressed it; first, that the newspaper advertisement is the EDainspring of all successful business, aud secondly, that because advertising reduces the cost of production by inI creased turnover, it pays to buy advertised goods. Advertised goods tend to become “standardised” goods simply because it does not pay to advertise goods of poor quality. There still seems to exist in certain quarters the feeling that publicity on the big scale cannot possibly pay. 1 have heard this voiced by business men of repute, notably in connection with certain firms which spend respectively £120,000 and £lBO,OOO a year in newspaper advertisements. If this is true, it means that the most successful businesses are run by imbeciles! But is it true?

1 know of a certain product, unknown eighteen months ago to the British public, which is eating its way ruthlessly into the sales of older established competitors, the proprietors of which have “eased off” on advertising. j It has become a household word. “Newspaper advertising in papers which go into every home has done the trick,” said the publicity man in charge of sales to me. “It goes on cutting the cost of manufacture by increasing sales and turnover, and thu public gets the benefit.” | The newspaper advertisement can be digested at leisure. It has the “intimate” touch which is the “selling” [touch. Further, each copy of a newspaper is read by at least three or four people. “OUT OF SIGHT. OUT OF MIND.” Advertising in the newspapers would seem vital to two sorts of businesses: the business that is building and the business that has been bujjt. Some of the most successful concerns in tho i United States 1 found upon personal investigation each year set aside a fixed percentage of their profits for reinvestment in newspaper advertising. British concerns are beginning to follow their example more and more, i Have you ever noticed that tho build-up business which eases off its advertising is apt to disappear? Where are some of those once enormously profitable concerns which some of us remember twenty years ago? We all of us have known the name of a famous commodity from childhood. Yet the managing director of this famous concern stated last year to its shareholders that, living on its past, it had gradually reduced its advertising, with the inevitable result that the name of the famous old firm began to drop out of the public mind, for “out of sight, out of mind” applies more to advertising than anything else.

When people hear that a paper like the “Sunday Pictorial” of London, charges over £lB an inch for advertisements. they are apt to believe that advertising only concerns the big man. That is not true. 1 have before me the actual books of a certain garden accessories firm which commenced business in 1921 with a capital of £l2O. For two and a half years that little firm of two people refused to use the newspaper, putting ail their money into circulars.

One day they put an inch “ad.” into the “personal” column, which instantly brought returns. Six months afterwards their turnover had become eleven times that of the corresponding period in 1923, all due to the beginning of the “inch ad.” which led to various advertising experiments. POWER OF SUGGESTION. 1 have taken the opinions of three leading American and three leading British business men, each of them a leader in his own line, and have found absolute unanimity upon what each called “the secret of all successful advertising,” despite differences of opinion upon detail. Tho man who is behind an adding machine which has made its way through the counting-houses an<) banks of the world put this secret in tho following words: “There is but one secret of successful advertising, which itself may have a thousand roads, and that is ‘the cumulative advertisement,* which does its work through ‘suggestion.’ Keep on hitting the iron until it is hot!”

Any reader can check this from his own experience. The first time we see the advertisement of a new article it almost fails to make a mental impression. The second time we pause a moment to have another look at it. The third time we feel that “there must be something in it.” And then, the autosuggestion having done its w*ork. wa feel we must try it. Then we buy it. The truth is that there are a thousand roads in advertising which have never been trodden. Individualism in publicity; initiative in publicity; and incentive in publicity are the “three I’s” of all successful advertising.

It is “the three I’s” which to-day are building up tho little business; which arc holding secure the business already built; and which are giving tho public good articles at the lowest possible prices. Does advertising pay? Ask the 3000 delegates to the International Advertising Convention, delegates drawn from all parts of the world. They know it pays.