CONSULT THE CUSTOMER

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3304, 2 June 1931, Page 2

CONSULT THE CUSTOMER

Sir Francis Goodenough, C.8.E., chairman of the Government Committee on Education for Salesmanship, speaking on “ The Foundations of Commerce,” reports the Scotsman, said: “ As a people they were really rather indolent, and very much prone to blame other people for their troubles. They had been too prone in recent years to expect the politicians to find the pill that would cure the earthquake or the particular measure that was going to get them out of their commercial and industrial troubles. Let them leave the politicians alone, and let them think much more of self-pelh than of State-help.

“ If they were going to wait until the politicians had restored their markets to them, they had better order their coffins. Their competitors in the past few years had not beentroubling about what politicians could do for them. They had been going out into the world and studying the markets of the world and how to capture them. “ The heads of successful businesses sent their sons to public schools and to the University and brought them into business afterwards, and in most cases those young men took either science or engineering at school or the university. They came into business with a science degree or an engineering tripos, and their whole mind turned toward the very interesting problem of production. “They had Been educated largely with a production angle to their studies. Was it to be wondei’ed at that the rising men in industry had given a large proportion of attention to problems of production and management and not sufficient to marketing? The humming machinery of production, the men employed in it, the works themselves, were all obvious and interesting, but the customers’ goodwill was less obvious, but ever more important. “ If the customer did not get complete satisfaction he did not repeat his orders; the humming machinery would be silenced and rust to decay. The workmen go on the dole or starve, and the capital become non-produc-tive and disappear. They had got to get away from the old idea that * business was business,’ which sounded simple enough, but, in its implications, meant <that there was a code of business which was different from the code of honour in private life. “Unless the idea were wiped out of the minds of business men in this country, the business of the country was bound to go downhill. They ha,d got to substitute throughout their trade, at home and abroad, the ti uth that business was service.”