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Show WHAT IS ADVERTISING? Vhat is advert isins;-? Owe I'univ of salesmanship. Purpose? To sell. Who pays for it ? John and Mary Public, say tliey do, indirectly. Solomon Isaac Husiness Man says lie knows too well that he pays for advertising. But I say the customer doe ; not pay an advetising bill if the adverising is effective, efficiently done, run in the . right medium at the right lime, and is, in every other respect, right. For when greater demand for goods is created by advertising, ad-vertising, more goods can be manufactured in larger quantities, and shelves restocked at less cost per unit of production per item of merchandise, in consequence of that created demand, either at less cost or with more quality at the same cost which' amounts to the same thing. There you have the theory of mass production and quantity buying packed together in -a pecan shell.- Yes, the merchant is sure he pays the advertising cost. But I say he does not, for the larger the volume of business busi-ness the retailer can -do, the less his percentage of overhead, over-head, of which advertising is but one of many items. No more light, no more heat, no more of several other overhead over-head items required for $110,000 turnover than for $100,000. Well, if the customer doesn't pay and the merchant doesn't pay for adverising then, who does pay for it? Why, bless your souls ! The truth of the matter is that effective advertising is self-supporting-, self-liquidating. Nobody pays for good advertising-, unless, if -we must find someone to pay for it, guess it comes pretty near being the non-advertising merchant who pays and pays whose overhead goes up as his sales volume goes down he and the noiT-ad-reading customer who buys blind, fails to read the ads and in, consequence, gets stuck with inferior, non-advertised goods, at higher prices pri-ces than he need pay. And there you have one answer to the old, old question: ques-tion: Who pays for effective advertising, in the final analysis? Not the buyer of advertised'' goods, not the merchant who sells the goods and uses the advertising-space, advertising-space, but; the non-advertiser who fails to get the business busi-ness and the non-ad-reading public. Prof. John Casey, U.of Oklahoma. |