The Edison phonograph monthly (Jan-Dec 1908)

Edison Phonograph Monthly, Oct., 1908 You are not making all the money you can as long as you neglect to call the attention of every possible Phonograph buyer to the Edison Phonograph. Follow Up Phonograph Sales After you have sold a Phonograph, do not strike that customer off your list. That is only the beginning. You ought to make a great deal more money out of selling Records to a customer than you did when you sold him his Phonograph. There are twenty-four new Records every month, and all of them are good. Of course, you cannot sell all kinds to everyone, but there is at least one example of every kind, and every customer you have ought to buy some new Records every month. They will if you go after them in the right way. If you let them know when the Records are there, if you invite them to come into the store and hear them, if you take pains to take out the kind of music they like when they are there, and if you are as good a salesman as we think you are, you should sell at least one new Record every month to every customer to whom you ever sold a Phonograph. And here again advertising comes into play — our advertising. We send you a great deal of printed matter about the new Records — The Phonogram, the Record Supplement and various other things, calling attention to the new music. Send them out or distribute them. See that every single man in your town who owns a Phonograph hears about the new Records in time. The only advertising that is successful is persistent advertising. It is not enough to advertise once, or one day or one week; it is advertising all the time that makes a business successful. Surely you do not think that the big advertisers of the country — Wanamaker, Marshal Field, Rogers, Peet & Company and other retailers— made a success by any one splurge of advertising. They advertised every day. It is not necessary, however, for you to advertise every day, but you should advertise frequently and regularly. You must persist. You will not get your money back the first or second day. You will not get your money back until you get the people in the habit of coming to your store for the goods you sell. This is just as true whether you sell Edison Phonographs exclusively or whether you sell other kinds of goods. It is the advertising that sells the goods. Of course, you must have a good store, careful clerks, the right goods, fair prices, and the like, but even with all these things you cannot make all the money you should make unless you advertise. We want to make it as easy as possible for an Edison Phonograph Dealer to make money. We want to place every advertising help in his way that we can. Every month we are sending you good material, material which costs us a great deal of money, and which will bring you business if you will use it in the right way. More than this, we want to get every Dealer to help us with his own experience. Send us the advertising you are doing for yourself. Send us sample ads from your newspaper. Tell us about your window dressing and how it worked out. Tell us about your sales and how you make them better. Tell us just what you are doing. Ask us any questions you like; bring us your selling or advertising problems, and we will try to help you. We want to make this department an open court. We want the Dealer to consult our advertising department as often as he needs in order to do good work. We wish to assure you that there is nothing that we will not do to help you sell more Edison Phonographs and more Edison Records. Making the Most of the Political Situation Now one more word about the Records made by the candidates. In a month election will be over. You should sell a great many Records in that time. Remember that there is nothing in which men are now so interested as politics. You ought to be able to sell a full set of Bryan or Taft Records to every Phonograph owner in your town, and you ought to sell more Phonographs for the sake of hearing the Bryan and Taft Records. Write letters to the leading politicians in your town. Get the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Committees interested. Push these Records as they should be pushed, and you will do the biggest month's business on Records you ever did. Then after election remember that you will have Records made by the President of the United States. Whichever ticket is elected, you will have the Records of the President. Advertise this fact. Make a big window display the day after election, showing the picture of the winning candidate surrounded by a heap of his own Records, with a card calling attention to the President's Records and the price.