The talking machine world (July-Dec 1924)

22 THE TALKING MACHINE WORLD December 13, 1924 The Ruling Factor in Business Progress Quality and Development of Salesmanship Is One of the Determining Factors in Fabric of Distribution, Says W. Braid White To say that this is the industrial age is to mouth the merest truism; but to understand just what is meant by the words is another thing. For they mean so very much; they mean, in fact, everything. They mean the whole secret of the trend of things to-day, the whole explanation of what the world is and what it is likely to become. They mean the whole difference between the world of the last generation and the world of this generation. Taken together, they are only three, those words, "the industrial age," but they are the three most important words that the English language can furnish. Bigger than armies and navies, more important than legislation, than government, than Which would you yourself prefer? VOLUME and clarity being equal to, if not greater and finer — tone being much superior — appearance being admittedly better — resale prices being no higher — and margins of profit to you being at least as great — which would you yourself prefer — which would you yourself choose — TtlOr Speaker Lamp [Patents Pending] answering a two -fold purpose or an awkward, ungainly horn? Thor Speaker Lamp is the original combination Loud Speaker and electric lamp. All others are imitations. Concealed within a graceful, finelyproportioned baseof stippled, bronze gold polychrome is a special speaker unit made by the famous Dictograph Products Corporation, which amplifies and reproduces perfectly, bringing out every tone of voice and instrument. It is non-directional, making it unnecessary to sit directly before a horn to hear distinctly. Consider— Thor Speaker Lamp as a merchandising policy of selling only the best products — consider the extensive advertising in national radio magazines —consider that it sells for $35 (Table Model with parchment or any color silk shade) — and you have manifold reasons for doing -as Pacific Coast music stores have done — stocking it in anticipation of Christmas business. Dealer and jabber franchises in certain territories are still open. Correspondence invited. THOR Radio Division of the GOLDEN GATE BRASS MANUFACTURING CO. 1239-1243 SUTTER STREET SAN FRANCISCO (122) diplomacy, than art, than literature, than philosophy or than religion is Business. For if business were to stop the world would stop, civilization would come to an end, the grass would grow in our streets and the earth would relapse into another pastoral age. Business has to go on because to-day business is civilization, is society, in the only practical meaning of those words. The industrial machine has become so immensely big, so astonishingly and incredibly complex, the parts of it are so huge and so cleverly interrelated that the stoppage of any part of them is the stoppage of the whole part sooner or later. Industry in its modern phase no longer needs strive to find ways of producing enough to satisfy the wants of a consuming public; rather must Business strive constantly to find consumers to absorb the product of Industry. The most important, the vastest, the most complex of all problems is the problem of finding enough consumers to take up the product of factory, shop and mill. Salesmanship Rules World That does not mean that the actual productive capacity of the country is in fact too great, for if everybody knew exactly what he or she wanted and was sufficiently intelligent to buy what civilized life requires for the equipment of a civilized person, factory production would pretty well match public consumption. Business, however, since it must have its profit, and since nothing better than it has been discovered for furnishing a link between production and consumption, has here to step in and to regulate production. In part it does this because it needs a profit on its transaction if it is to live. In part it does it because a vast deal of its activity and its genius must be expended in providing consumers. The phonograph would never have come to what it has achieved if its consumption had not been stimulated by advertising and by salesmanship. That is why there is, in fact, nothing in the world to-day so important as salesmanship. This is a big statement and one perhaps which is more easily made than realized. Here We Are, Anyhow Yet it is strictly true. Whatever one may think about the desirability of a society organized wholly upon business, with its entire prosperity, even its very life, bound up with the mechanism of consumption, with each citizen more important as an actual or potential consumer of goods than as a creative mind, a seeker after truth, a patriot or a saint, the fact does remain that into this position we have maneuvered ourselves; so that in fact the production and the distribution of goods become the most important work of our modern organized society. The salesman then emerges as the most influential single factor in the whole organization of modern life. How strange, then, how unfortunate, how deplorable, that salesmanship should still be regarded as a dogfight, as a game of wits in which nothing matters except winning, in which the conditions of the game, its fairness, its position in the scale of actual service to the community are accounted of less value than the immediate material result. True enough is it that selling must sell; but equally true is it that the potential consuming power of western civilization is not only not exhausted but hardly as yet seriously tapped. It is a question of selection and of organization, not of the exhaustion, either now, or at any assignable date in the future, of public consuming power. Consumption Never Stops For there is never an end to the wants of civilized man, simply because there is never an assignable terminus to the process of civilizing man. No one can imagine a world to-day without the automobile; yet no one needed an automobile twenty-five years ago. No one can imagine to-day a world without luxurious clothes and a host of domestic labor-saving devices; yet twentyfive years ago few women wore silk stockings save in evening dress, and electric equipment for the home, save in respect of lighting, was virtually unknown. The cleverest man in the music business of a generation ago would never have dreamed of the reproducing piano or of the latest wonderful achievements in phonographic recording and reproduction. He might have thought of them as possibilities of the future; but it would probably have been a remote future. That the people would absorb these things as soon as they came on the market and through them develop inside of a year or two a whole budget of new needs, all costing money, would never have seemed even worth while dreaming of. Yet it is so. Radio is the latest and most rapid of all mechanical developments, and it will probably give rise to a whole new series of correlated wants, each being taken up as it comes along and absorbed by the people without the least difficulty. Yet, salesmanship fails in its obvious duty to society when it lends itself to unworthy objects; and the next step in the development of business must be the step of creating greater responsibility in the practice and profession of selling. Profession or Chaos Salesmanship has to become a profession; which means that it has to be recognized as a calling equally responsible and equally important with law, medicine and teaching. If it is allowed to continue as a sort of free-for-all, with no responsibility behind it and everything forgiven if the figures look right, then salesmanship will produce a chaos which will only be resolved by some drastic overturn such as the radicals in all countries are dreaming of even now. That is why it is so important that every man who either is or hopes to be a salesman should realize what his work really means in the society in which we live. In our music business, and especially in the talking machine business, it is the salesman who, in every sense of the word, carries the burden on his shoulders. Every talking machine and every record made from now on will have to be sold; and that means that it will be up to the salesman to create in the minds of the people of this country the true picture of what the talking machine is and does. Hitherto most of this has been taken for granted; but in face of the modern competition in all its forms, high class demonstration and studied salesmanship of the most refined sort will have the call. It is the same everywhere, in every type of business or industry. Higher and higher manifestations of salesmanship are called for, and business, more and more, is headed towards the professional goal. Business must some day be a profession, with all the sense of responsibility and the passion for Tightness which the word profession connotes; and salesmanship is the lever of business, and upon its development rests in a considerable measure business progress. COTTON FLOCKS . . FOR . . Record Manufacturing THE PECKHAH MFG. CO., S£iBB5S.a{Ke V.