Edwin Balmer

“ And the consumer, selecting the product he wants out of the many that are put before him through advertising, can establish it even against the preference of the house that supplies it. The pure foods, the superior clothing, the stronger shoes, and the better grades in a hundred lines have been presented to the consumer and maintained through the advertising appeal to the people direct. I do not mean that all superior products have been or must be so introduced—that no unadvertised goods have quality; any more than that no good leaders have come up in politics under the old methods. ”

“ Obviously from the primitive condition where there is no specialization and everyone supplies merely his own need, no one can have a surplus to advertise. There cannot be even a market. Exchange and sale must be the barest barter between chance individuals. And even when specialization commenced so that markets developed—a market being a place where a man who learned to do one thing well enough to make a surplus to exchange for someone's else surplus of the thing he learned to make—unless speed became a requisite of the transaction, there would be little advertising impulse. ”

“ The American problem of production, as thus traced, is not how we, as a nation, may make more; but how we may profitably use more. The check to the more rapid advance of our industries is not the physical limitation of manufacturing, but the social and economic checks of consuming capacity.
When the manufacture of all sorts of commodities leaped far beyond the popular acceptance of the use of those things, the suppliers took to advertising to create quickly a higher standard of living among the masses to make them consume more. ”

“ Advertisers, in direct proportion to their efficiency, are continually and persistently changing people's habits, making them wish for new and better products and more of them; but they cannot—even the best advertisers—secure to themselves anywhere near all the benefit of their own advertising. Even the most successful advertising gives only a part of its returns to the one who pays for it. ”

“ Yet today those merchants are by no means all out of business who fear they are transgressing a trade law, more sacred in their conception than any divine law, if they themselves attempt to regulate by the propulsion of advertising the fate of their product which they have placed upon the market. ”

“ In a moment the machine could overthrow the industrial traditions of the race—but the economic and the social?
In a moment the industrial revolution put before the millions those thousand things which had never before been in their reach; but it was to require almost an economic and social revolution to make them reach. The very workmen making the products, which now became so cheap that they were available, did not want them. For too many centuries the "people" had been forced and accustomed to consider the refinements and even the simple luxuries of life as for the use only of the few. ”

“ Through advertising the people need not take the selections others make for them; they can take into their own hands the choice and determination of our commodities.
Sometimes of course the people will select poorly; but by exercising selection—intelligent, educated selection more and more—they will certainly arrive at selecting better goods for themselves than anyone could select for them. And exercising their prerogative of directly selecting, they will develop, through our advertising, not only the highest type of products, but also the best class of consumers. ”

“ Likewise, we must recognize that our present commercial system has the same inherent weakness, as we, the buyers, have little or no direct choice of commodities. We must inevitably have inferior products so long as we are willing to merely endorse those selected for us by others. Before the advent of advertising our commercial system suffered from precisely the same condition as the political. The middleman chose our products for us on the basis of his own interest in profits rather than the consumer's interests in the goods. ”

“ Advertising is the Force and Instrument to Solve the Problem.
It seems very radical indeed to imply here that the rapidity of our progress as a nation is determined very largely by the efficiency and effectiveness of our advertising. But it is true. It is taught by every school of sociology that individuals, communities and races are progressive according as they acquire new needs—as they learn to make things and to use them. ”

“ In primitive commerce, also, each consumer might have selected the goods he wanted. But as society became complex we first delegated our political choice to the middleman, then neglected it altogether. Similarly in commerce, we early delegated our selection of goods to dealers; neglected to specify our preferences to them, until we not only lost the privilege of active choice but became almost indifferent to it.
And when we cannot find the grade of products we would like on the shelves of the stores, we meekly choose from the assortment the store keeper has chosen for us. ”

“ We all know that the advertising of these houses has enormously increased their distribution, so that the manufacturers can count upon a steady consumption and can manufacture with all the economies of a steady and tremendous trade. Yet because we have everywhere ocular evidence of the immense sums these houses pay in advertising, we still assume—most of us—that with every pair of shoes and every article of clothing, we are paying besides an advertising bill. ”

“ For now we have the supplies for a high standard of living—not for the few only but for all. And to sell today's increasing supplies we cannot sell only to the classes who have already adopted the high standard of living but must make the "people" now adopt a new standard high enough to consume our increasing supplies.
As suddenly and as rapidly as a manufacturer can produce new and better articles cheaply he must somehow include them into a standard of living which will embrace enough people to exhaust his supply. ”

“ I do not deny that seeing other people with automobiles and passing by the stores might have sold the car to you "some day." Seeing other people clean and seeing soap in the stores would as surely have sold that laborer soap "some day."
Advertising merely effected the sale sooner—"now." The difference advertising effects for which manufacturers pay their scores of millions yearly is that difference between "some day" and "now." And this difference is not only all the difference in the world but often also the difference between this world and the next. ”

“ This is business—the plain economic and social necessity of the advertising business.
The advertisers of soap and collars keep after us for cleanliness and neatness; the advertisers of filters have perforce to make us hold higher regard for our health; and the advertisers of plumbing requisites, our sanitation. The advertisers of such advanced things as automobiles and pianos are after us, much more continually and effectively than the sociologists, to raise our standards of living and to cause us to make the greater effort toward personal efficiency. ”

“ You have to learn to need! And what is the matter with all you Americans today that you don't try harder to use more as fast as you can make more? Why can't you keep up with your goods?
"In my time, what was holding us back was not that we could not use but we could not make. To progress we had to learn to make, and we learned. But now you have learned to make and passed on to the problem of learning to use—to consume. Not incapacity to make faster is holding you back now but incapacity to consume faster. ”

“ In the long run and in most cases advertising itself precludes that, for extensive advertising means an investment whose returns are accumulated and spread over a long period. Advertising expenditure, therefore, stands as a practical bond or forfeit for misrepresentation. The sale of the product must be lost if its claims of quality are not substantiated. And underlying even this is the surety that the article is presented to you by direct advertising because the manufacturer does not wish to compete with those making the inducement to the dealer the basis of their sales. ”

“ An old man, whose memory went back well before the days of universal power-machine production summed up this problem to me not long ago. He was not the sort of old man who looked back and considered his time better than ours because his problems were simpler. Just the opposite.
"The difficulty of a problem confronting a people, as the difficulty of a school boy's sum, is the register of their progress," he said. ”

“ When Mary Jones who put up peaches and pickles for sale for her neighbors who could step about easily and complain to her personally, changed to the great, machine driven, efficient-corporated and unpersonal—often anonymous—pickling and preserving plant hundreds of miles away, the moral separation between the producer and the consumer became almost as great as the physical—and almost as inevitable. ”

“ All of us will agree, I think, that the great shoe manufacturers who depend upon the advertising appeal to the wearers of shoes as the basis of their sales methods—that is, such firms as the Regal Shoe Company, Sorosis, and so on—and the great clothing makers who depend upon education in cloth values, rather than in popular ignorance, for their sales—that is, Hart, Schaffner and Marx, Stein-Bloch, and others—give us year in and year out a constantly higher grade of shoes and clothing at a low price than do the suppliers of similar goods unadvertised. ”

“ But still no one denies that, if we had a wider and more established use among ourselves for our own products, we could produce far more still.
From the beginning of the race, men more or less constantly produced new and better goods—constantly but very slowly. For five thousand years, or eight thousand, or however many thousand years of human production preceded our factories and power machine, all the results of human labor could require little advertising. ”

“ For, under the conditions which have been portrayed in previous articles, good products stood no fair chance of being presented by dealers in some quarters. Time after time a superior product could not get on the dealer's shelves, for while it was better for people to eat, or wear, or use, it was not better for the dealer to make profits on in selling it to customers.
By advertising, the manufacturer of quality product can place his merits before the people. He gets enough people to ask for his product to force the dealers to put it on their shelves. ”

“ Some of the best and most effective advertising to introduce new products in many lines has failed not because it didn't introduce the new product but because it did not sell enough of the advertiser's particular brand of the article to pay. It is one of the heroic, inspiring things seen in the advertising world when a pioneer advertiser goes ahead, risking everything on some new thing to be introduced, hoping only for a paying return and that not too much will be stolen from him. ”

“ The vital change from the time prior to sixty years ago, when advertising had yet to start toward its present efficiency, is not the increase in the facility with which advertising matter can be printed and circulated and read, but it is the entire transformation in our method of specialized production of commodities, the revolution in the speed with which it became necessary to carry on production and distribution. ”

“ As a very preliminary consideration, then, in accounting for the efficiency of modern advertising, we must recall first that our modern advertising as a business proposition is markedly and conspicuously successful today, though it is of necessity laying by a sinking endowment fund which would run almost any other enterprise. For advertising's most effective influence must be upon the most impressionable part of our population—the young. ”

“ But when our great machine shops, our systematized factories and machine production developed suddenly, almost without warning, a great flood of very good and very cheap products in a quantity and at a price available for almost all surged upon the market. A thousand new things, a thousand old things made in better ways, were suddenly offered to the millions. ”

“ And to help themselves, they helped it, till today the larger and the happily most rapidly and steadily increasing bulk of advertising is becoming recognized to be sound and beneficial. For the real, essential nature of advertising action, when given a true test, has had to come out. Essentially advertising is the twentieth century link which restores not only the physical proximity but the moral identity and responsibility of the manufacturer to the consumer. ”

“ How modern advertising began to operate to raise the standards for the manufacturers themselves, to better the product and effect a purer as well as a larger output, is equally as important to trace.
For we Americans are credited with producing more and using a larger proportion of what we are capable of producing than any other people. We also accuse ourselves of manufacturing and being forced to consume a larger proportion of "shoddy" and unworthy, cheap and adulterated products than any other people. ”