Such procedure may be excused by pleading the lack of standards in marketing, but the plea is not good. For every business there are certain stand ards; investigation will bring them to light, and if no attempt is made to ferret them out, the directors are merely gambling with the stockholders' money. It is an offense against common sense to put money into undigested marketing schemes. The making of a good marketing plan is chiefly a matter of common sense, and common sense is only another name for logical thinking.
5. Magnitude of manufacturer's problem.—We are to consider the campaign primarily from the man ufacturer's standpoint. His marketing problems are far more numerous and far more difficult than those of either the retailer or the jobber. The latter two classes of distributors have their general markets se lected for them. The retailer must sell to others than dealers, and the jobber must sell to dealers; their only problem is how best to reach the natural mar ket. The manufacturer must first select his market and then find out how to reach it. Many of the sug gestions in our presentation of points to be covered in a marketing campaign will not apply to theyetailer or the jobber. Others, however, will apply to them, and all classes of merchants will find solutions to many of their own problems by a study of the manufac turer's campaign. While, as before noted, the selling campaign is a unit, our concern is with that field of marketing analysis that precedes advertising and per sonal salesmanship and is common to both.
6. When the analysis should be made.—Three oc casions should prompt a manufacturer to make a care-, ful analysis of his marketing problem: (1) before Ile starts in business or immediately thereafter; (2) when he wishes to add advertising to his .other sell ing activities and finds it necessary to investigate and chart facts hitherto neglected; and (3) when he awakens to the necessity of greater competitive effi ciency, and decides to abandon bit-or-miss proced ure and substitute for it carefully considered poli cies built on known facts. We shall consider the manufacturer who is about to begin business, as such a time is a logical one for a complete analysis. The matters considered, however, will ordinarily be just as useful to the manufacturer already in the market who wants to find out how to get more sales and more profits. There are three groups of facts to be con sidered—the product, the market and the way to reach the market.
7. Making sure of the product.—At the outset there should be technical tests to prove that the product is right, that it will do the things the manu facturer wants it to do. Before Crisco was put on the market, the manufacturers experimented for years to