REACHING THE MARKET 1. Lack of standards in selling.—All this prelimi nary study helps the man with something to market to reach the people who might buy it. It is the foun dation on which the campaign must be built. When the time comes to use the information that has been collected in preparing for the campaign, the great dif ficulty of successful selling becomes apparent. Sell ing is not standardized; very few of its practices have been reduced to rules and principles. Except in a small minority of cases it is not possible to say that with certain facts about the trade, certain facts about the product, and certain facts about the market, such and such a method of selling must be adopted in order to insure certain results. If the marketing of a prod uct could be reduced to Set rules, everyone with any thing to sell could be sure of a fortune. All the ro mance of business would be gone.
2. Importance of right judgment.—Uncertainty of results in marketing is due chiefly to the uncertainty of human judgment. There may be the most careful marshalling of all known facts regarding the trade, the product and the market. The exact balancing of the various parts of this information might result in exactly the right decision as to how to sell the prod uct; and yet no one can be exactly certain that he has given just the right weight in his judgment to each of the factors involved. A manufacturer's investiga tion, for instance, may have uncovered a seeming need for his product among a certain class of people, the dealers in the field may be seemingly open to proper approach, and competition 'nay, in his estimation, be negligible. Relying on his careful investigation, he may adopt a certain selling method which practically ignores competition, only to find that his competitors have reserve resources and strength that even his care ful investigation could not uncover. It is this falli bility of human judgment which makes selling un certain.
The greater the amount of the data collected pre liminary to the campaign, and the more exact it is, the less likelihood there is of wrong decisions. The
possibility of making a wrong decision on the basis of collected data is no excuse for doing without data entirely and rushing into a marketing campaign with only whim and limited personal experience as guides.
3. Campaigns must be made to order.—It is not the purpose of this and ,the following thapter to tell any given manufacturer how to market his product. Campaigns do not come ready-made; each one must be built to fit peculiar conditions. Our purpose is simply to suggest the steps that must be taken in any complete campaign, and to indicate how some of the facts gleaned in the survey of the trade, the product and the market may be organized and used as a basis for the solution of some of the many problems involved in reaching the market.
4. Trade channels.—In the actual plan for the cam paign, following adequate preliminary study and in vestigation, the first thing to do is to select the right trade channels. The selection can be rightly made only with full knowledge of the functions of the vari ous types of retailers, the place of the jobber, and the relation of all middlemen to one another and to the manu facturer.
All the possible methods by which a manufacturer may market his goods in the domestic trade are shown in the following outline: A. Manufacturer direct to consumer.
1. Thru solicitors or canvassers.
2. By mail.
3. Thru the manufacturer's own retail stores, usually conducted on the chain-store prin ciple.
B. Manufacturer direct to retailers.
He may reach the retailers either thru salesmen or by mail.
1. He may deal with one or more of these kinds of retailers: a. Country general stores.
b. Specialty stores.
c. Department stores.
d. Chain stores not owned by the manufac turer.
e. Mail-order houses.
f. Cooperative buying organizations of re tailers.
2. He may sell generally to all retailers in a se lected class who will buy.