6. Canvasser.—A second descendant of the itin erant merchant is the chnvasser who solicits orders from house to house, but•who does not carry his stock with him. An example of this type is the solicitor of orders for household appliances of various kinds. Manufacturers sometimes sell in this way be cause the nature of the thing to be sold may demand it. When aluminum cooking utensils were first in troduced, probably no method would have been so suc cessful in inducing housewives to abandon iron and granite ware for the new material as house-to-house solicitation. A. subscription edition of a book could often not be largely sold if it were simply put on the shelves of a store, and sales were left to depend on advertising or on the voluntary demands by custom ers. Selling by means of personal solicitation of the consumer is appropriate when an article is so little known that its merits must be presented personally to each prospective customer, and when printed advertis ing cannot be relied upon to create a demand.
There is another reason for using the canvasser. Some articles, even tho they do not come under the classification in the preceding paragraph, are never theless sold by canvassers. For instance, altho soap is usually sold in retail stores, some soap manufac turers sell their product thru house-to-house solicitors. The reason is expediency rather than necessity. Es tablished retail channels may be loath to take on a new line that competes with goods already in stock; sales thru retail stores may be too small to per mit of the desired large scale production; in some cases sales thru canvassers rilay yield a larger net re turn to the manufacturer than sales thru retail stores. These and other reasons may dictate direct selling even in the case of articles that are not barred from established retail channels.
Some exceedingly prosperous business houses have made a study of marketing thru canvassers and have built up national organizations of house-to house solicitors. Publishers of books and maps,. and manufacturers of stereoscopes, kitchen utensils and a great variety of other goods do an immense busi ness of this sort chiefly in rural and semi-rural dis tricts ; and some mail-order houses, like the Larkin Company, for example, have used this method of selling to supplement their catalog business. Never theless its possibilities are limited. There is un doubtedly a popular prejudice against the house-to hOuse solicitor. His powers of salesmanship have so often been enlisted in the support of articles of doubt ful merit that even the canvasser with a strictly repu table article to offer often finds his usefulness limited by reason of the common prejudice against his sell ing methods.
7. Specialty salesmem—A third type of the dealer who takes his wares directly to the consumer may be termed, for lack of a better name, a specialty salesman. The difference between him and the house-to-house canvasser is one of degree and not of method. In
stead of calling upon everybody, the specialty sales man carefully selects his prospective customers and centers his attention upon them. It seems a far cry from the persistent solicitor for "Lives of the Presi dents" to the highly paid commercial ambassador who obtains a railroad's order for fifty thousand dollars' worth of supplies, but, as far as basic selling methods are concerned, the two types of salesmen must be placed in approximately the same class.
A specialty salesman, in the sense in which we use the term, usually handles a line that is of so technical or complicated a nature that it must be carefully ex plained to the consumer before he can be induced to purchase. An example is the cash register salesman. He has to prove first to the prospective purchaser that a cash register is necessary in the' "prospect's" busi ness, and then he often has to prove that his particular machine is preferable to any other. The problem of the life insurance salesman is similar. Some times an article that is originally introduced to con sumers by specialty salesmen becomes so well known that it is later handled profitably thru the medium of regular retail stores. In other lines, however, the specialty salesmen are continued long after the public has become perfectly familiar with the article. This is usually the case when the demand is comparatively limited and the competition is severe. The typewriter business illustrates this condition.
In many instances no other selling method is pos sible than the direct contact with consumers by the use of salesmen to solicit business. Locomotives could not be sold in a retail store or by mail. It is equally obvious that little life insurance would be sold if every man who ought to carry insurance were left to discover his need himself and to call at the office of the agent on his own initiative. It should be re membered that advertising can do much to supple ment the work of the salesman in this as in other fields. Speaking generally, very high-priced articles can probably be sold more successfully and econom ically by personal solicitation of the consumer than by any other method. In the case of low-priced ar ticles, however, the method is undoubtedly expensive for the produc" er, and not infrequently increases ap preciably the cost of goods to the consumer. A dealer entering upon a business in which this selling method is customary would ordinarily have to adopt the same method to get his share of the trade. There are many business houses, however, employing only store sales men, assisted by effective advertising, that have com peted successfully with other houses in the same line that relied solely on their outside salesmen. Under normal conditions it would be a mistake to inaugu rate an expensive system of local and traveling sales men to sell goods to consumers unless competitive conditions clearly demand such a procedure.