THE FIELD OF MARKETING METHODS 1. Two parts of a campaign.—When a sales cam paign is launched the men toward whom it is directed may feel its influence in two ways. If the seller takes advantage of all possible methods of appealing to the market, the people who compose the market are con scious of two different kinds of appeals, one the ap peal of personal salesmanship, and the other that of advertising. These two expressions of the selling idea are the tangible results of the plans the seller has made to market his goods.
2. Relation of salesmanship and advertising.—Per sonal salesmanship and advertising are the only ways in which anything can be sold. In business, per sonal salesmanship is the attempt to promote the sale of goods or services by direct solicitation of one buying unit or one individual at a time. Advertising is the attempt to do the same thing but by the solici tation of more than one buying unit or more than one individual at a time. Personal salesmanship is the attempt to influence the individual, while advertising is the attempt to influence the mass. Whether one or both of these methods of selling are used, the seller nnist make careful plans for them. He must give much thought, for instance, to the selection, training and supervision of an effective force of salesmen; similarly, Ile must pay' careful attention to the tech nique of advertising-74he organization of the adver tising department, the determination of an advertis ing policy, the writing and placing of advertisements, the preparation of supplementary advertising aids, the. recording of results, and so on. The greater part of this planning is hidden from the public; the con sumer feels the influence of the salesmen only after they have been selected and trained, and the adver tisements are realities to him only after they have been planned, written and placed.
3. Plan back of the is much more to a sales campaign than the consumer sees. Back of the effective selling talk of the salesmen and back of the vigorous message of the advertisements there is a world of planning, study and thought with out which the campaign could never be successful and in fact could not even start. Much of this prelim
inary planning is concerned specifically either with personal salesmanship or with advertising—it is con cerned, for instance, with those activities that have been listed in the preceding paragraph.
Back of these things there is still another group of considerations to be studied—a, tremendously im portant group of problems that must be solved by everyone who has something to market before he de cides to employ salesmen or to utilize the force of ad vertising. In other words, before a salesman has' been hired or before a stroke of work has been done in the advertising department, the promoter of the business must have evolved a plait behind the campaign—he must have solved a hundred difficult problems upon which depend his selection of advertising or personal salesmanship, or both, as suitable marketing tools, his selection of trade channels, and his decision to use established methods of reaching the market or to hew out some new road between distributor and consumer. It is with this plan behind the campaign that we are to deal—the field where personal salesmanship and advertising meet, the field of marketing problems that do not pertain exclusively to either one of the two expressions of the selling idea, but that lie behind both.
The activities of a marketing campaign may be com pared to those of a theater. The audience in a the ater is aware only of the actors and the scenery, which may roughly be compared with personal salesman ship and with advertising respectively. Back of the scenes much takes place that the audience does not sec, but all that goes on there is concerned immedi ately with the work of the actors or with setting up the scenery. In the same way, behind the scenes in a sales campaign there is much that the public does not see—the hiring and training of salesmen, and the planning, writing and placing of the advertisements.