With respect to the advertising matter—samples, booklets, signs, window displays, electrotypes for ad vertisements, etc.—that is sent by manufacturers to dealers, there has of late years been a change of heart on the part of the most successful manufacturers. Tons of expensive advertising material have been wasted yearly by being sent to dealers who could not use it or who did not know how to use it. Nowadays these things are being done better. The dealetr wel comes help from the manufacturer, but he wants ad vertising help that will advertise him and his store first and the manufacturer and his goods second.
The traditional "dealer helps" were designed solely to help the dealer to sell the goods of the manu facturer who furnished the helps. Store signs, dis play cases and electrotypes for newspaper advertising were in this class. A few manufacturers began with these things in order to help the dealer to link up with the national advertising of the manufacturer. The helps were effective as long as only a few manu facturers offered them. 13efore long the number of dealer helps increased so rapidly that no dealer could use more than a small proportion of them.
When this situation grew serious and dealers began to grow cold to the attempts of many competing manufacturers to help them sell their goods, a few manufacturers designed a new kind of dealer help— the kind which is designed, first, to make the dealer a better merchant, and secondarily to sell the manu facturer's goods. A garment manufacturer, for in stance, provideg the salespeople of its dealers with a complete correspondence course in salesmanship. A watch manufacturer gives to its dealers without charge complete directions for installing a cost-ac counting system in a retail store. And a manufac turer of sad-irons gives away a, brief but practical course in retail advertising.
Just now helps of this sort are in great demand. It is easy to see, however, that like the traditional form of dealer helps, they will lose much of their effect if they are taken up by a large number of manufactur ers. The second manufacturing jeweler who offered a, retail cost-accounting system to his dealers would not reap very great rewards. When the time comes when all of the old forms of dealer helps will have been over done, manufacturers will have to tax their wits to de N-elop some new methods of putting dealer good-will behind the selling of,the manufacturers' goods.
17. Sales the plan for the cam paign should provide for complete records of every thing that is done and of the results that are obtained. Plans should be laid for recording the exact cost of every phase of the salesmen's activities, every differ ent form of advertising and even the cost of every in dividual advertisement or piece of advertising matter, the cost of sales and advertising administration, the total marketing expense, subdivided in as great detail as may be desirable, the sales attributable to the dif ferent methods of sales stimulation, records of con sumption of the product by individual buyers, by towns, salesmen's territories, states and other units, net profits from each form of selling effort in each subdivision of the market, comparative statements of costs and sales and profits for successive years, shown in whatever detail may be advisable, and, in short, every kind of record that may enable the manager of the business to know exactly where the business stands, what is being done to stimulate it, the cost of the stimulation and the results obtained. Without careful preparation for records of this sort, the busi ness cannot be conducted on the basis of known facts, and it will be seriously handicapped in its future de velopment.