Radio showmanship (Sept 1940-May 1941)

*T he Shop That Radio Built by CHARLES SENGIR, President, Mar-Selm Beauty Shop, Minneapolis. The Case History of 10,000 Broadcasts It happened in October, 1929. That may be an important date to most people because it was the time of the great Wall Street Crash. For us it's important for another reason. It's the date that we first went on the air with a radio program. We've been on ever since, week in and week out, year in and year out, 1929 to 1940. Eleven momentous years for the Mar-Selm Beauty Parlors, eleven years that have seen our business grow by leaps and bounds to become one of the largest of its kind in the country. We can say without qualification that we owe it all to radio. Not just to some radio, used once in awhile, but to consistent hammering via the airwaves. We owe it to the nearly 10,000 radio broadcasts we have presented in that time. Let's go back to the beginning. In 1929 ours was a moderate sized beauty shop, in an out-of-the-way location. True, our business had been showing a steady, but slow increase due to our newspaper advertising; we wanted something that would bring us more returns faster. Al Thoen, our manager, thought radio might be the answer. Anyway, it was worth trying. You see, we had something new to tell the public. In the days of high priced permanents, we were offering them at a lower price without sacrificing quality. We could do that because we had worked out our own specialized methods. So we did have a story. We did have something the public wanted. That's important ; no advertising medium can sell something the public doesn't want not even radio Can do that, potent an advertising force though it is. We did some heavy thinking before we actually bought any radio time. What kind of a program should we use.'' How often should we present it ? There Was an obvious answer to the first question. Something the type of customers we served would like. We thought that would be popular music. How often? It seemed obvious to us that you've got to keep hammering if you want maximum returns, so we decided that it should be a daily program. We bought fifteen minutes a day, six days a week. Though this doesn't have an important bearing on our success, I'll mention here that I went on the air myself. We felt that it was a good idea to have one voice identified with our establishment. Today, we probably would have called upon the production department of the radio station to create a radio character which would give us the individual voice we wanted. But radio was a little different then. So we went on the air with our first six programs consisting of popular recordings. By talking to each person who entered the shop, we checked returns, wondering what radio was going to do for us. That first week, 90% of our returns came from newspapers, 10% from radio. (Not so good, we thought. Well, give it a chance. We did.) Within a month, that ratio was reversed. Ninety percent of our customers came in because of radio — only 10% from the newspaper campaign, which we had continued. Phenomenal? Of course it is, but here in my file are the actual facts and figures. I've studied them lately. I checked them carefully before writing these words. Radio, in a siru/lc month, proved its worth to us. Right then and there we Said good-bye to the newspapers ami bought another fifteen minutes a day on the same station. Amazing things were happen ing to our business. Fifty perma mnts ;i d.i\ represented a big day to us u hell we started our radio campaign. Within a year, we 96 RADIO SHOWMANSHIP