A BOOM YEAR

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 470, 2 March 1933, Page 3

A BOOM YEAR

FIRMS REMAIN QUITE UNAWARE OF DEPRESSION. iREASONS FOR PROSPERITY. Tho?e who have read Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" will remember the story of the potent-smelling cheese; how the author's friend was asked to bring' a couple of cheeses do\vn from Liverpool in a crowded train; how his fellow passengers one by one slunk away and left him alone in tbe third-class smoker; how on arrical at Euston the crowd made a lane for him, "falling back respectfully on either side"; and how finally he g ot the cheese home and his family all fled him to live alone;) but the cook, when asked if she had noticed the smiell, replied, "What 'smell!" niad when taken close up to the cheese and told to sniff hard said she "could detect a slight odour of melons." We are reminded of this story by the inberesting news that there are some hundreds of British businesses who, during the last few years, must have been quite unaware of the worldwide depression. In nearly all cases their pi'ofits have been at least maintained throughout these difficult times; in many 1932 has proved a high record. What are these British businesses? Are they small, unknown, or in some obscure trade which' has by a miracle escaped the blizzard? | No, they are of all sizes; some of them, indeed, the higgest in the country, and they are engaged in all sorts of trades supplying- both luxuries and necessities. Here, taken at random, are some of the line,s in which they deal: — Men's clothes, women's clothes, boots, corsets, milk, coal, paint, jams, radio batteries, /candles, furniture, dog hiscuits, chocolates, silks, sugar, tea, ink, motor-cqrs, cigarettes, gas stoves, lemon squash, salt, infants' food, rubher soles, sauces, mowing machines, printing, electricity supply, coach services, restaurant and hotel service, laundry iservicc. Thei'e is scarcely any need

The na-mes of the firms and their products? Here are a few of them: Lever Brothers (Lux, Vim, Sunlight soaji), Radiation (gas stoves), Spratt't Patent (dog biscuits), Iiugon (Atora suet), Spillers (Turog bread, Millenium flour), Gas, Light and Coke Co. (ga,s supply), Ro^vntree and Co. (chocolate), Mazawattee (tea), H. P. Sauce, F oster Clark (Eiffel Tower lemonade), Cei'ebos (salt and bisto), Chivers and Sons (jams), Hovis (bread), Wright's (coal tar soap), Henry C. Stephens (ink), Reckitt's (blue, Robin starch', Bluebell and Karpol polis-hes), and there are dozens more, all "familiar in our mouths as household words." What is the secr'et of success which they share ? They are all professed believers in advertising; have you not seen the names of their products wherever newspapers and magazaines are read, posters posted and showcards shown? These firms will tell you if you a.sk them that they kept up their advertising during these times of depression, in many cases even considerably increased it. Their advertising was doubly effeetive beeause in some instances their competitors redueed theirs and left the.iield to them. An examination of the last year's accounts of some eighty of these prominent advertisers showed that the average profits on their ordinary shares exceeded 38 per cent.