Radio showmanship (Jan-Dec 1943)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Iture Sales idia is Half Selling Radio fe Store, Chicago, Illinois bit nervous; they visualize the store from the vantage points of their loudspeakers," Mr. Blinder explains. "But when they see their radio friends, life-size on the wall, they're at home immediately. That helps the salesmen tremendously." Mr. Blinder handles all the advertising himself, and was dogmatic in his early determination that hard, confident use of radio would build a business during years when other businesses were drawing in their horns, or dying off completely. At that time Nelson Bros, used all the small stations in Chicago. The programs were recordings, and the commercials, from the very first, sold specific merchandise at a specific price. Later, when larger stations began spreading the Nelson Bros, message from Gulf to Canada, Mr. Blinder turned to human interest programs to appeal to everyone from boiler-maker to bank president. The man-on-the-street had always been one of the store's best pullers, until the Federal Communications Commission outlawed some shows of that kind for the duration of the war. "We figured out a way to get around the war problem, though, by turning our man-on-the-street program into a service-man-on-the-street," Mr. Blinder says. "We broadcast from United Service Organization headquarters, where we interview soldiers, sailors, marines, and their parents, "For a regular man-on-the-street show, we adopted the FCC policy of safety in numbers, and we go to some large crowd, such as that in a theatre, where we hand-pick persons from the crowd to come down and broadcast. Of course we never let a person on the air if he seems particularly anxious to get on." Nelson Bros, believes with one-track conviction in concentrating the radio copy around the one thing, or few things, that the customer needs. "The stations we use allow us four price mentions," Mr. Blinder explains. "So, we've selected bedroom, living room, rugs, and three-room outfits as those things the customer is most likely to care about. Our policy is to mention the lowest price bracket we have in the store for each of these numbers." These low-price items are not lossleaders, Mr. Blinder insists. "We make a profit on them. They're values at the prices, with the mark-up a bit lower than it would normally be, but not low enough to lose money for the store. "The customer is not forcefully traded up from those numbers. If he wants them, that's what he gets. "A customer is often embarrassed to ask for the suite you advertised,'' according to Mr. Blinder. "The Nelson Bros. salesmen are instructed to show them the advertised number first. It is always near the elevator, and it always bears a placard: As Advertised— Marvelous Bargain, at "That placard has a double purpose," Mr. Blinder points out. "First, it starts the customer off with the item that was talked about on the radio, and it helps maintain that customer radio Nelson Bros, link that we want. "Secondly, it stimulates the salesmen to go ahead with a positive sales talk, describing why it is the marvelous bargain that it is. "The salesmen stick with that item until it is sold, until the sale is lost, or until the customer specifically asks to be shown something else. When our sales records show that the pieces we've been advertising aren't moving as fast as they should, we go into a huddle with our salesmen, and again warn them against JAN U ARY, 1 943 11