Radio showmanship (Jan-Dec 1949)

Don L. Davis, moderator of the "Gadget Jury," is considered the foremost authority in the country on the merchandising of new products. He's an advertising man from Chicago who saw the possibilities of selling the ingenious new products of the fertile American inventive mind by first getting them into the hands of the consumers, then relying on their enthusiastic word of mouth advertising. For the first time in merchandising history he has succeeded in selling new products, sight unseen, to hundreds of thousands of Americans, making them pay in advance for articles he won't describe or tell them about, and then when they expect to be thoroughly swindled they turn out to be his best salesmen. These otherwise-sane citizens skeptically but cheerfully send their dollar bills in advance for six gadgets. They are merely promised that they will receive one a month for six months, that the gadgets will be brand new, patented, handy, ingenious, practical articles for the home or personal use, which cannot be bought anywhere else, and that the combined retail value of the six gadgets will far exceed one dollar or their money will be refunded. So they fall for one of the oldest gimmicks of advertising— "double your money's worth, or your money back" — but instead of denouncing themselves afterward they are so delighted that they constitute themselves a tremendous membership committee to enroll their friends and relatives in the Club. The story of how the Gadget-of-theMonth Club is able to lose money on its members, yet make fortunes for the manufacturers behind it, began with an idea in the brain of a little Iowa farm girl in 1942. Mary Lou Moffitt was in charge of advertising for a company which could not sell its appliances because consumers had never seen or handled them. Miss Moffitt reasoned that if it were possible to get new products into the hands of enough consumers to create word-ofmouth advertising — the most sincere and persuasive kind — they could be introduced and sold more successfully and economically. She tried to convince her own firm to try it. They refused. However, she did sell them on grouping with 22 other manufacturers of new products to finance the Mary Lou Moffit, president and founder of Gadget-of-the-Month Club, demonstrates gadget which opens cans and bottles, cracks nuts, juices fruit and has a dozen other uses. idea. So they formed the Gadget-of-theMonth Club — a huge international sampling organization to introduce one new product each month. The cost of a Trial Membership was set at $1.00, for six months, and the Annual Membership at $5.00, for 12 gadgets, some of which were to be larger and more valuable than those sent to trial members. One of the original purposes of the 23 manufacturers was to market their own products exclusively, but the thing soon got out of hand. In fact, it ran away with itself. The GMC was launched in the spring of 1947 with a modest advertising appropriation in science magazines and direct mail pieces. While the general consuming public was slow to catch on the inventors were not. Soon it seemed that every mechanical genius in the country had heard about the Gadget-of-the-Month Club and wanted — not to join it primarily — but to sell his gadget to it. Every day's mail brought new inventions — soma of them crude — or the only sample in existence— many of them were more ingeniojs or easier to market than some of the prod' ucts of the 23 manufacturers, with the result that they now supply only 1 1 per cent (Continued on Page 32) FEBRUARY, 1949 15