RED CORD OF SENTIMENT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21217, 24 December 1930, Page 12

RED CORD OF SENTIMENT.

JBfR R. SQUIRES TO TRADERS. BRITISH SUPREMACY. HOW TO MAINTAIN IT. .(From: Oxjr Own Correspondent.) LONDON, November. 6. Sir E. Squires (Premier of Newfoundland) spoke straight from the shoulder at the annual dinner of the National Union of Motor Manufacturers on Tuesday, when frankly told the business men of Britain that they must change their methods of salesmanship if they desired to retain commercial supremacy. He told them that they did not know how to sell their goods, and that the united States, with better business methods, was cutting them ont of the Newfoundland market. You manufacturers (Sir Richard said) are not prepared to pay the price of sending your sellers to Newfoundland to get our- trade. Up to the present moment our trade is based on sentiment and blood by which the child is tied to its mother, but unless that thin red cord of sentiment an< l blood is surrounded by commercial activities, business interests, and individual contact, it will be •no more value than the centre of the cable ,by which you send your messages across the Atlantic, The copper centre of that cable is protected by gutta percha and steel. Unless you protect in the same way your red cord of sentiment and blood by commercial relationship and by the association of business, you will find the efficiency of transmission of the sentimental message, which is the present basis of our commerce, entirely decline as the years go by. “ THE CHANCE IS YOURS.” We beg of you to give us an opportunity of ■doing business with you. We do not want lethargy. We want efficiency; we want that something that, gives a business grip and the co-operation that enables competition In the world’s market. That chance is yours, and it is for you to level up to the opportunity and get the business. Take charge of our markets; they are yours if you wish them, but you cannot get them and hold them unless you put twentieth-century power behind their development and progress; PRACTICAL SALESMANSHIP. ; The British merchant has been -so accustomed to a standard of superiority and of quality—which nobody in the world would deny—so accustomed to control the world’s market; so accustomed to telling' the purchaser what he wants that he has forgotten the . one twentieth-century idea that true salesmanship, is to give the purchaser what he wants. Our difficulty with English manufacturers is that they want to sell us what they want to sell us, and not what we want to buy. We want to get right down to the job of making * and selling the goods the purchaser wants, and thereby you will control the market of the world. Get down to the business of practical salesmanship, and so retain the supremacy that England has held for centuries.