By D.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: The first installment of this story, published last week, told the condition of affairs that the author found when he took the position of sales and advertising manager of a certain young company manufacturing an electric dish-washer. The president's nephew had been in charge of advertising and sales, and he had gone ahead so fast with his advertising plans that the company was almost wrecked. As the author wrote at the close of last week's installment, "Only one need stood out sharply to stop everything until we could get onto a working basis, and then to work everything out laboratory fashion." What was done is related here.]

HE president's nephew had

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thusiastically carried away himself by the "possible sales the first year" that he had kept crowding the factory to produce, produce, produce. If they would make dishwashers he would sell them. course, it might be a little slow in starting, but the demand would come with a rush once the advertising began to pull-I think "jerk" would be a better word for the sort of reaction the young man expected from his advertising.

Desiring to get in closer touch with the whole situation, I made arrangements, at the beginning of the third week, to go over all of the mail every morning before it was distributed to the various departments. I found, first of all, that those few consumers who had machines-there were less than two hundred out-didn't know how to use them properly and were kicking to the dealers, and the dealers were, of course, passing on the kicks, with a little extra force, to us. Whereupon I went to the shipping room and looked up a copy of the booklet of instructions that was being sent out with the machines, and I didn't wonder very much about the kicks after "giving it the once over." It read like a patent application, and, indeed, I found out that parts of it actually had been lifted bodily from the patent papers! It was

D. M.

a man's idea of washing dishesexpressed in lawyers' language! So I decided that the first thing for me to do would be to work out new directions for using the machine. And right here let me hammer that point home for the benefit of any manufacturer who is expecting to launch any product or device that needs instructions for operation or use: have said instructions written by the best talent you can possibly get-some man or woman who knows human nature and has the knack of imparting knowledge simply and definitely and in terms that will be easily understood by even the most ignorant user. What experience I had had previously in writing advertising copy was never of more service than in the writing of that booklet of instructions. I suddenly took a great interest in watching women wash dishes and asking them questions about their methods. Among other things, I discovered that the men who were building the machine were almost beside themselves to make it wash the hardened yolk of egg off dishes, simply because they did not know what thousands of women know: that such dishes should first be immersed in cold water, which will quite readily soften the egg. These men were trying to accomplish an almost impossible task, for the hotter the water used the harder it "set" the egg. So I put a note in the directions book that, in half a dozen lines of ten-point type, wiped out one of the factory's worst problems. In the end we had a very simple little book, illustrated in places with little drawings, which made the operation of the machine perfectly simple and clear. That experience taught me that to have the instructions correct and clear was just about as important as to have the product right.

Another thing I discovered in

SO

going through the mail was that the literature all featured a thirtyday trial offer. The fact is, I discovered this in the literature itself, but in going through the mail and later tracing down a number of thirty-day customers' orders I found out many things. First, many of the dealers did not take kindly to the thirty-day trial plan; it made trouble for them. Second, we could not profitably send the dish-washer direct to a customer at any great distance and make any money after the freight was paid, though we had been obliged to do so in many cases to back up our promise. And, third, that of the number who had taken advantage of the thirty-day trial offer about half of them were loath to "come across" with the money. You see, the business was young and so small that there was no credit department or no facilities for determining whether a person was responsible. Orders were so welcome to the youthful sales manager that each and every one was filled promptly, in some cases simply on a postal-card request. In one case a machine was sent to a little place out in Oregon where there was no electric current within fifty miles. The woman sent the machine back. The crate had been lost some place between Oregon and the Mississippi, apparently; also, the motor was missing. And we had paid the freight both ways! Other people, I found, were very much interested in trying out the new device and found it fairly satisfactory up to the time of receiving the bill, at the end of the thirtyday trial period. Then they discovered that, either they did not care for the machine at all, or else they didn't care thirty dollars' worth for it, but would be glad to settle for, say, fifteen or twenty dollars. That was two years ago, but every month even yet we are writing off of our books mean little accounts, some of them half paid, which neither we nor the collection agencies can seem to get settled up. When the machines were sent back they sometimes came by express, always at our

expense, for we promised to pay the freight both ways if the dishwasher should not prove perfectly satisfactory. Needless to say, most of the machines that came back were in such shape that they could not be sent out again, and to fix them up was just expensive enough that it was cheaper to build new ones. So we still have a store-room full of them.

A WRONGLY CONCEIVED "FREE TRIAL" PLAN

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I am not claiming that the thirty-day free trial is not a good sales proposition. It may be all right if you are careful to investigate each prospect, and if the machine to be sent out is perfected and practically certain to give satisfaction, and if freight or press charges are not too heavy; otherwise the trial is very likely to be on your side, and the other folks will come in strong on the free! There were, however, quite a number of trial-order people who were very nice and paid for their machines promptly, though we had later to send new models in about 80 per cent of the cases, because the old machines developed troubles which could not be overcome by correspondence. A letter, no matter how diplomatic, will not convince a woman that a machine is all right when it is chipping her best china!

I might go on for pages telling about the things I discovered as I got deeper into the business. But you would not believe some of them if I did tell them. I had no idea, up to the time I took the contract of salvaging the wreck, that one energetic young man could do so much damage and waste so much money in so short a time simply by following out what seemed to him, and to others in the organization, perfectly sane premises.

I must give him credit for being ingenuous and for having considerable taste in selecting the machinery with which he was to work! The office was full of the latest machines and filing devices. There were cabinets large and small, cabinets of the latest type

for filing and storing everything. There were machines for doing practically everything that could be done by machinery. Apparently any salesman who came along with any sort of desk or filing device, or machine, or piece of office equipment got an order. There was machinery and system enough for a good-sized life insurance company! My young predecessor had possessed a pretty good idea of the mechanics of business; in fact, I believe he had got caught in the machinery of advertising, and the machinery was running away with him.

After going into the general situation carefully and getting an idea of what seemed to be necessary, our first step was to connect with a reliable advertising agency. By this time I had pretty definite ideas of what needed to be done, and how to go about it, but, while I have considerable confidence in my own judgment, after seeing what a wreck one person's misjudgment can make, I felt that I wanted to have all of my theories and plans checked up by other men who had had more general experience.

TWO YEARS TO UNSNARL THE
TANGLE

We have put in nearly two years salvaging the wreck of that business, for it had very nearly gone to pieces. I do not know the exact amount of money that had been spent in advertising and sales promotion work; I have never had quite the courage to gather the figures, but I do know that five thousand dollars would have been ample to take care of all of the advertising that should have been done in the undeveloped state of the machine up to the time I arrived on the scene, and I should imagine that eight or nine times that amount would be a conservative estimate of the amount actually spent. And no business can afford to throw away that much money in its infancy.

During these two years we have done absolutely everything on a laboratory basis. We looked first to the machine itself, and stopped shipments for months until it was

perfected to a point where we felt that it was as near right as it could possibly be; that anything that was done to it now would be in the nature of improvements, not corrections. Meanwhile, we worked on advertising copy and sales plans. We prepared three different styles of advertisements, each with a distinctly different appeal, and tried them out in the newspapers just as soon as the machine was marketable and we could make shipments to dealers in certain cities where we wanted to run the experimental advertisements. We offered a booklet and keyed every advertisement, running the series in some fifteen or twenty cities and towns. While we did not get a very large number of requests for booklets, as we would have had the advertisements appeared in magazines, we did get enough to get a very good line on which appeal pulled best. And, strangely enough-or, perhaps, you will say naturally enough we found that the appeal we had thought the strongest was of only passing importance, and the appeal we as men, regarded as least important, appealed very strongly to women. Better yet, we found that there was such a demand for our product, when properly presented and backed up with dealer distribution, that women, sometimes with their husbands, came right to the dealers' stores the very day after the appearance of an advertisement, with a copy in their hands, and bought a machine on the spot.

We started out three salesmen to talk to dealers with no thought of immediate sales, but with the idea of getting their slant. We exhibited at several food fairs and house-furnishing shows solely for the purpose of getting all sorts of people into our booth and studying their reactions. We found that price was not as strong a factor as we had believed it to be; that an electric dish-washer was generally a family purchase; that it was bad business to depend upon a man's enthusiasm because his wife generally proved to be against modern household appliances; and many other important