HOW TO SELL YOUR GOODS.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 604, 1 February 1921, Page 5

HOW TO SELL YOUR GOODS.

(By William Henry Beable, President Sales Managers’ Association). There is a general expression that because advertis ng is expensive it must necessarily enhance the cost of advertised goods as compared with those that are not advertised. -Nothing is further from the truth. The consumer, of course, pays for everything; the cost of raw material, wages for production, packing and carriage, the expense of selling, and the profits of the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the shopkeeper. Advertising is simply part of the selling cost, and is, in fact, the cheapest form of selling.-, Its cost is considerably more than made up by the saving in commercial travellers’ salaries and expenses, in wholesalers’ and retailers’ profits, by the lesser proportionate freights on large quantities and by the manufacture on a much greater scale.

Cheapest Way. A commercial traveller can sell in the same time twenty times as much of a well advertised article as he can of one that is not known, and this means that it is done at onetwentieth the expense. A shopkeeper makes more money selling a large quantity of an article that people ask for than he does on one that he has to induce them to buy, even if he only gets one-half the percentage of profit. While the advertising expenditure on some of the well known and largely advertised articles is great, the sales are so enormous that the advertising represents a very small percentage. In one article sold at from one to two or three shillings per bottle it does not represent onehalfpenny per bottle, although the advrtising expenditure is one of the largest in the country. That halfpenny is saved many times over by the reduction in the. cost of manufacture by producing on such a large scale and by the other savings already referred to. Advertised articles are not only safer to buy because the reputation of the manufacturer and his name on the package are guarantees of quality, but they are almost invariably better value; because advertising is the cheapest form of salesmanship.— Daily Mail.