Advertising and National Prosperity
IL—Some Crucial Failures HOW do we British, who were the pioneers in Ointroducing machinery to mankind, the very authors of the industrial revolution, answer the question why such a thing as a British typewriter is practically unknown to the outside world, and why the lead in very many other forms of applying mechanical devices to modern life has been taken by foreign nations ? • Why should a mechanical device like the typewriter, now of absolutely world-wide use, have become in its manufacture the practically complete monopoly of America ? If it were merely a question of one device, the phenomenon would be less suggestive. But the typewriter was followed by a score or half-hundred sister contraptions : cash registers, mechanical calculators, shop and office equipment of many kinds—all as American as the typewriter. Nor is the American monopoly, confined to this group of machines ; large sections of the machine-tool trade, certain household labour-saving devices, some types of farm machinery, are as much her monopoly.
We say easily enough, " English conservatism " and " American inventiveness." But a point we should observe is that the American manufacturer does not trust to the " natural " readiness and aptitude of Americans for the employment of mechanical devices. He wages, by means of advertising, relentless war against the natural man's innate objection to having life made more efficient. Take the ease of the telephone.
One would have supposed that when every house and almost every room in every house, certainly every room in every hotel as a matter of course, has a telephone, the " producer " would have regarded its advantages as having been sufficiently driven home to the American public. Yet far more money is spent in America adver- tising the advantages of the telephone, as a glance at any American magazine may show one, than is spent in this country, where an hotel of two hundred rooms regards one dubious instrument in a dark corner as sufficient provision of these newfangled contrivances: Here it would probably be regarded as waste t6 spend money in showing how an increase in the number of telephones in the country by six or seven times would add to its efficiency and prosperity, help it to solve its agricultural, its unemployment, and its other problems.
Again, in America, where basin and ewer ablution is now practically extinct and unknown, and where the mountain wayside inn offers you hot and cold running water in your room, if not a bath room attached to it, there is more informative advertising about plumbing in any six magazines than you could find in any English sixty.
It may be said : Such advertising is merely sustaining an established habit or known method ; to create new habits or make known new methods is beyond the power of advertising. And again I would appeal to the facts. America is a producer of wood, and, broadly speak- ing, Britain is not. Britain for generations has had every economic interest in developing the use of metal in substitution for wood ; America has much less urgent need to shift from wood to metal. Yet the American metal industries have for years maintained a campaign of collective advertising addressed to the general public for the purpose of making them aware of the thousand and one ways in which in house-building, on the farm, in offices, iron and steel can replace wood. Whole page advertisements in the newspapers and popular magazines (not only in the trade papers) enlarge on the fact that " From Roof to Cellar " steel and iron can he used advantageously where wood has previously been employed. With this result. For some time metal has been used extensively in America in a hundred places where its use in this country is quite exceptional. The steel mills have levied themselves so much per ton on their output for the purposes of collective advertising. They have not trusted to the " natural " tendency of Americans to be adaptable and progressive. The manufacturers are aware that the ordinary citizen building a house or running a farm or an office cannot, by the light of nature, be abreast of all the technical progress which Might help him ; that he cannot always be guided by builders, architects or shopmen who may have special interests or like himself be creatures of use, habit, routine, advising the old ways because they are those with which they are familiar. A personal experience may be cited in this connexion. The present writer happens to hive been a small farm owner in both Britain and America. Recently, in Britain, he was faced by some typical farming problems : the repairs to roofs of old buildings—as part of the equipment of the place for pig-breeding—and the further excavation of a pond and gravel pit. For the latter work he attempted to purchase a " horse scraper " (a " Fresno " or " buck " scraper) of a type very much used in America for purposes of excavation, the making of banks, etc. It is an inexpensive and extremely simple and efficient instrument, enabling one man with a team of horses to do work which would require seven or eight men with spade and wheelbarrow. Persistent searches carried on for weeks among agricultural implement dealers, through the pages of agricultural papers, enquiries of various manufacturers and metal firms, failed to produce any knowledge even of such an instrument. Owing to the failure to get the machine this part of the work was abandoned as proving too expensive. Came the roofing problem. The local ironmonger said " Corru- gated iron," a method to which the narrator has very strong objections, as he desires the farm to be a place of pleasure and simple attractiveness. He put his foot down about the further use of corrugated iron. He tried to find flat metal sheets (since metal sheets of some kind had to be used) which could be coloured to harmonize with the other roofing. Nowhere among local dealers could he find such things. Flat galvanized sheets were " never used for roofing '7 ; corrugated sheets were the proper thing. Next the problem of equipment troughs, etc. Local dealers offered cast-iron pig troughs at a truly terrifying price. Small galvanized troughs, of a kind that would defy the efforts of the pigs to upset them, were presumably unobtainable. He found that the equipment of the place by the most economical means known to ironmongers, or to the advertisement pages of the agricultural papers, would involve what was for the owner too great an outlay. Result : nearly all the projected enterprises were abandoned.
Circumstances later took the owner to Chicago. The telephone and telephone directory on the nicely equipped writing-table of his room (rate, seven shillings a day) prompt him, by some train of association, to look up " scrapers." Within exactly thirty minutes of this idle investigation, a salesman is describing every imaginable kind of scraper, giving detailS also of a most efficient form of flat metal roofing, •in any colour ; of sheet-iron troughs sold by the dozen ; of watering troughs that are sold in units, packed in flat sheets and put together by the farmer. For troughs of the cast-iron type which would have cost two pounds each in East Anglia, the salesman- suggested a galvanized substitute which did exactly the same Work at a cost of exactly 2s. 2d. A further telephone call brings, the following morning, the catalogue of Sears Roebuck. An hour was spent in going through it and making certain comparisons. The mowing machine for which £26 had been -paid in 'East Anglia could have been purchased from Sears Roebuck for rather less than- half that price. A windmill for pumping purposes which had formed part of the proposed English farming scheme, and which had been offered in England for twenty pounds, was offered-by Sears Roebuck for $48 ; that is to say, for a little under half the price.
Now, the point to be observed is this : many of these things—horse scrapers, flat iron roofing, galvanized sheet-iron troughs sold in " nested " series—may he obtainable in England at somewhere near the price for which they are obtainable in America. But the fact is very carefully hidden from the man who wants to buy them, or who would want them if he knew of them. If one prospective buyer who knew that such things existed, and wanted them, could not discover where they were obtainable, what is the chance of selling them when even people like ironmongers believe they do not exist ? In America the manufacturer takes care to see that anything that he has for sale which can be useful to farm, house or factory is made known in the right quarter. If like knowledge were more readily available in Britain, it would add as much to the market of the farm as to the market of the factory. Advertisement making the farmer aware of better methods adds to his productivity ; that added productivity pays alike for the devices and the advertisement.
This form of advertising is not merely selling one man's product as against another's ; it is a means of enlarging the market all along the line by raising productivity and efficiency. It is because Scars Roebuck (who do not manufacture what they sell, but act as salesmen of the manufacturers to the public) through their organization can bring the knowledge of what the factory has for sale to ten million customers (that is the number of addresses which is the basis of their mail order business) that those factories can supply, in a country of high wages, mowing machines at twelve pounds which in England cost twenty-six.
The manufacturer in England is as able, as a manufac- turer, as his American colleague ; the British workman probably more efficient in a technical sense than the American ; the English farmer probably a better one than the American. But what lacks in the English case is a certain ingenuity and adaptability. There is a greater gulf in this country between the technician and the layman. The non-technical American is quicker in availing himself of advances made by the technician, although the advances may be no greater than those made in England. And although the gulf is smaller the American manufac- turer does more to bridge it. by appropriate education of the public. It was above the dignity, presumably, of the British manufacturer of an earlier generation to educate the public in the use of typewriters, cash registers, labour- saving machinery of other kinds. And it is very largely this educational work--the manufacturer puzzling out and making known new devices which might help• the farmer or shopman or office man--which from the point of view of the country's general prosperity is the most productive form of advertising.
Had my East Anglian farm been situated in America, the information which I sought about scrapers, and flat metal sheets for the roof, and pig equipment, and the troughs in unit pieces, and the building which local labour could have erected, would have been readily available. Which would have meant, not merely that things would have been bought which were not in fact bought, not merely that British soil would be producing something which it is not now producing ; but that this increased activity, multiplied thousands of times throughout the country, would make it possible to produce the material in much greater quantities and at a much smaller price. And we should not be faced by the anomaly that the machine which costs £20 in England can be obtained in a country where Wages arc very much higher at half the price.
[Next week Mr. Norman Angell, taking the typewriter as his text, writes of the possibilities of scientific large- scale advertising. The article is of especial importance, for he points out how our prosperity depends on our quick and intelligent power of adaptation to modern conditions. —En. Spectator.]
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