19. Necessity or selling plan will be partly influenced by the classification of the product as a necessity or luxury. These terms are merely relative; the luxury of today may be the necessity of tomorrow, or what is a luxury in popular thought may, in reality, be a necessity to which the public has not yet been educated. Typewriters were certainly not thought of at first as necessities in business, and in order to sell them the manufacturers had to adopt the expensive method of direct solicitation. They are necessities IIONV even tho the selling plan has not been greatly changed. The increasing number of dif ferent kinds of outlets for the output of typewriter factories, however, indicates that the old method of selling is no longer universally necessary.
20. Will the business be the prod uct a fad or will the demand, once created, be perma nent? If it is a fad, the campaign must be quick and productive of instant results. If the demand will be permanent, a considerable investment in good-will may be justified, and the plan may be based on the policy of going slowly but surely. A popular book dealing with the causes of the war and its conduct might be advertised widely and expensively in the expectation that the public interest would quickly respond to the advertising appeal. A manufacturer of a roofing preparation, on the other band, would expect to get returns slowly; builders would not re spond at once to his appeal; he would have to lay the firm foundations for future success by a careful picking of sales channels and by husbanding his re sources so as to be able to continue the campaign dur ing the time necessary for its cumulative effect to be felt.
21. How many sales to a many sales will be made to a customer? A new brand of clothing might be pushed continually in a given ter ritory because the customers could be induced to buy it over and over again. A manufacturer of office safes, however, could not operate in the same way. If any territory were completely worked, he would soon exhaust it and would have to move on to a new market. The consideration of whether the product is to be a "repeater': or is to sell only once to a cus tomer is of first importance in planning the market ing campaign.
22. Are there selling when will the product sell? Is it in use all the year around, or is it seasonal? The marketing campaign of a dis tributor of garden seeds would be entirely different in many respects from the campaign of a manufac turer of fountain pens. The man who can get satis factory returns from his selling efforts twelve months in the year will do business in a different way from the man who has, say, two selling seasons a year and who in the off-seasons must either lay off bis selling force or use them as in-u-nediately unproductive trade missionaries.