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PART ONE OF TWO IN SERIES SHOWS MARKET TRENDS, DOLLAR POTENTIAL FOR AD AND BROADCAST BUDGETS AS SOFT GOODS FIRMS BEGIN TO EXPAND AND MATURE
operators are being forced to think about advertising and then use it. They are turning much more frequently to broadcast media as they seek a mass market and new segments of that mass market which ensure both survival and profits.
This potential of many more ad dollars and broadcast dollars spurred SPONSOR to outline some of the dimensions of soft goods in this twopart series. Part One attempts to define the market, its potential, some of the stumbling blocks which are being overcome. Part Two discusses companies with varying sales goals and their application of broadcast techniques to soft goods merchandising requirements.
Soft goods is a vast, sprawling and amorphous body difficult to give dimension to and complex to compre
hend in terms of today's advertising and marketing patterns.
Every element in the soft goods field — and there are many thousands of them — is battling for attention. Each has to influence the consumer and the retailer and — in most cases — the cutter/manufacturer, too.
Their basic problem has almost as many facets as the revolution of which these companies are a part. They need to ( 1 ) isolate their objectives, (2) select the best methods by which these goals can be achieved, (3) and then act. But as simple as this would seem, too many soft goods people find analysis and perspective, followed by action, hard to come by.
There seems to be one certainty in the uncertainty of the soft goods world: the customer, the woman who shops for linens and yard goods and
clothes, is confused — mightily confused.
Size, alone, militates against any easy answer, any simple advertising formula or any clear-cut line of sales attack.
More than 65 cents of every dollar spent in the nation's 2,700 department stores represents a consumer investment in soft goods — in diapers, rugs, sheets, fabrics, apparel. If you add expenditures in non-department stores — such as women's specialty shops, haberdashers, piece goods outlets, hat and shoe stores — you begin to fill in the edges of this mammoth industry which has dimensions staggering to the marketing mind. Add still more definition to the soft goods picture by including industrial sales figures and you'll conclude that soft goods represent by far the largest profit potential for marketers. Some, however, ask if the vein is worth mining.
Mammoth as is the potential of soft goods, the actuality is miniscule. The soft goods industries with notable
FASTEST-GROWING CONSUMER AD BUDGETS ARE IN
Photo courtesy of Blo.imingdale's, New York
Photo courtesy of Gimbel's, New York
MEN'S AND BOYS' APPAREL is highest profit retail line, WOMEN'S, MISSES' CLOTHING needs advertised "augers heaviest ad backing by suit-makers, fabricators thority" labels to clinch such factors as color, style, texture
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SPONSOR
21 FEBRUARY 1959