CAMPAIGNS TO OBTAIN DEALER COOPERATION 1. Place of dealer in the campaign.—The attitude of the dealer is one of the vital considerations in plan ning an advertising campaign. The success of the campaign depends to a great extent on the degree to which dealers will be willing to cooperate with the manufacturer in the sale of his goods. Sometimes the dealer will not cooperate. If he is openly antag onistic, the campaign can scarcely be successful; if he is indifferent, success can be bought only at a great price. Some manufacturers seem to think the dealer owes them cooperation—that he should lend his active efforts to encourage any sort of campaign for the promoting of sales thru retail stores. This attitude on the part of manufacturers is responsible for much dealer antagonism. The dealer resents at tempts at coercion; he resents the implication that he must give his active support to any manufacturer simply because the manufacturer elects to distribute thru the dealer and conducts some sort of campaign to help the dealer sell his goods.
Dealers cannot handle every line that is offered them; they must make careful selection from the al most countless things that manufacturers seek to in duce them to push ; and they are likely to put their efforts behind the products of those manufacturers who wisely seek cooperation by proving themselves most willing to cooperate unselfishly with dealers. The attitude of the advertiser and the dealer toward each other is more wholesome than it used to be, but there is still room for improvement in the understand ing of the dealer by the advertiser and in the under standing of the advertiser by the dealer.
2. Three periods of dealer cooperation.—At the beginning of the twentieth century many manufactur ers seemed to think the attitude of the dealer did not count—that the force of advertising with resulting demand on the part of consumer would require deal ers to handle advertised goods, and that competition among dealers for the trade in such lines would make it necessary for each dealer to push them. This was
the period of "Force the dealer." There was much talk about using advertising as a club to compel the sale of advertised goods, whether dealers wanted to sell them or not. Some advertisers were successful in "forcing the dealer," altho at very great cost. Others found that it is unwise to try to make dealers do something they do not want to do. It was dis covered that many dealers can induce their customers to buy what they recommend, regardless of an orig inal intention on the part of consumers to buy some thing else. "Forcing the dealer" in general proved to be an expensive and wasteful method of inducing sales, even in the few cases in which it was successful.
3. Period of "Bluff the dealer."—Following the "Force the dealer" period, which lasted for about ten years, came another, similar to it, but marking a sort of half-way stage between the crude methods of the early days and the more intelligent methods of ob taining cooperation in vogue today. This might be called the period of "Bluff the dealer." The adver tiser began to have some conception of the dealer's attitude; he did not ignore the dealer's opinions—he did not merely advertise to consumers and trust to consumer demand to force the dealer into line. He began to cater to the dealer and to try to make him eager to have a part in the large sales which were ex pected as a result of the manufacturer's advertising. He did this by talking grandly to the dealer about the large scale of the projected advertising campaign. He took space for his consumer advertisements in me diums that the dealers were sure to read. He did everything, in short, to impress' the dealer with the importance of the manufacturer and with the size and probable effectiveness of his advertising. The adver tiser was not really bluffing; he really carried out his largely advertised advertising plans, but he deluded himself, and he tried to delude the dealer, into think ing that those plans, with nothing added, were enough by themselves to deserve and to obtain the cooperation of the trade.