Fear the Facts and Fool the Women

I

I SUPPOSE old Charley Davenport never in all his life heard the words ‘public relations policy,’ let alone understood what they mean. He was a plain and unimportant man, dead and gone now for many years, his forge cold, his anvil quiet. And yet I never hear the words ‘public relations policy’ without being reminded of him and the story he used to tell of the Wall-eyed Cobbler and the face he turned to the street.

The old people in Charley’s village who knew him well say that sometimes when he was waiting for his irons to heat, and a companionable listener was by, he liked to get out his blackened pipe and as he smoked tell the story, almost legend by now, of the little cobbler who came to the village when Charley was a boy. He hired a shack near the flagstone walk in the centre of the town, and set up his tools and cobbler’s bench close to the street-side window for light. He was a smart little man and by reputation a good worker, but he was handicapped by having one wall-eye, which, without affecting his ability, gave him the curious appearance from one side of looking always out and away, never at the work under his hands. And as chance had it, as he straddled his bench, this wall-eye was turned toward the street.

All newcomers have hard sledding at first along any Main Street, but the cobbler’s first weeks were an unusually lean and hungry time. He was a mighty down-hearted man when one day a neighbor dropped in to chat and before leaving said, ‘Friend, trade would be a heap better for you if you’d switch your bench around. Folks passing your window and seeing you, seems like, watching them and never your job, are a bit suspicious of your skill. Round here, people like a man’s eyes to be on his job, so, just as neighbor to neighbor, turn the other side of your face to the street.’

Old Charley Davenport would finish the story with a twinkle in his eye as he solemnly declared trade had been better for the cobbler from the very day he turned his bench around; and then, leaning to his forging, Charley would soberly say as his listeners nodded agreement, ‘A man can’t do better than keep his eye on his own job; watching the passers-by only sends ’em by your door.’

The theory and practice of public relations policies are being discussed a great deal these days by important people in many fields of business, and somehow they usually manage to make the idea sound complex and mystic, as well as the exclusive attribute of great industries. Yet there are some things that Main Street seems to know with an old and familiar assurance long before cities discover them, and the plain and common-sense practice of public relations policies is as simple to small-town people as Charley Davenport’s story of the wall-eyed cobbler. There are two sides of the face that business may turn to the street, and just two fundamental policies which they represent. That these two policies affect the daily life of every human being in this country is perhaps less generally recognized, but their study is an absorbing and vital one for those who admit to some degree of affection and respect for essentially American institutions.

To understand the story, intelligently, it is necessary to realize that no man and no organization with something to sell can escape possessing some sort of public relations policy. Like the albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s neck, it becomes part and parcel of every activity. It is not always identified, of course, as I learned a long time ago. I remember very well being sent to study a large shoe store which had become financially distressed. After watching the old proprietor wait on several customers I mentioned to him tactfully, as I thought, that perhaps his public relations policy was wrong. He growled at me that he did n’t possess anything so fancy; he left that to the big fellows. ‘But,’ I said, ‘you treated that last little woman as though she were an idiot. That after all is your version of a public relations policy.’ The old man frowned at me and answered, ‘Public relations nothing! That’s just my private opinion of Emmy Brown!’

But indeed the plain fact is that whether it happens to be Tom Smith’s grocery store on River Street around the corner from Main, or Henry Ford’s place in Detroit around the corner from everywhere, every business with its first gesture of production or distribution demonstrates its possession of a formula for dealing with its customers. Whether it is the railroad company, the steel industry, the laundry which calls for your family wash, or the new minister at the church you attend, each organization has some sort of code that dictates its public manners. If you like those manners, you are likely to buy its goods. If you do not like them, though you may still buy its goods for expediency’s sake, you buy with a mind prepared and eager for the first agreeable alternative that appears. So the desirability of the right public relations policy becomes obvious.

II

It seems curious that, with all the thousands of types of businesses there are in the world, there are nevertheless only two basic public relations policies. I have yet to find a record of any exception to the rule. One policy watches the business under hand, one watches the customer. One says, ‘Let the customer know the business,’ and one says, ‘Let business know the customer.’

The first policy is the older, and no more fascinating study exists than the record of its development from a dim origin thousands of years ago. It began, I suppose, with the first thing a man made, not because someone offered to pay him for making it, but because his brain pictured what his hands burned to create. Whether it afterward was traded for money or kind is of no consequence, for it had not been ‘ made to sell.’ The point is perhaps subtle, but of great importance. Out of this far beginning came a producer’s policy — stern, austere, and a little stiffnecked. It is the craftsman’s philosophy, which inexorably demands of a man his best, not measuring the customer’s willingness to accept less, not bargaining against the producer’s own integrity and skill. Inescapably the formula of the maker of goods, not the seller, it jealously guards both product and maker’s reputation. Whether he happens to be a Cellini or the manufacturer of very good cooking utensils, your real producer has a sturdy pride and dislike of compromise that resent hurry, indifferent workmanship, and inferior materials. With a great simplicity, such a producer, his job done, lifts his hands from his product, steps back, and says, ‘Let the customer know the merchandise.’

So vital and unyielding was this policy for many centuries that, even with the constantly expanding intricacies of production and distribution, the majority of businesses were permeated to the very point of sale with an identical formula. Retailers for long years of pioneering service and hard-won prosperity in this country built soundly on the belief that not only their profit but their place in the communities they served depended upon what the customer could know about the merchandise they sold. They watched, in short, the work under their hands, not the passers-by.

Some twenty years or so ago the second policy made its first significant appearance. At that time life was beginning to hurry, new things were being invented faster than news of them could be spread, and the problem of distribution became acute for those responsible for sales. An entire new technique seemed necessary to create absorption for all the things an army of old and new manufacturers wanted to sell. The old way was slow. Under it nothing could possibly be introduced to-day to have acceptance and volume to-morrow; so, with a tumbling, pushing horde of things crying like unborn souls for admittance to the world, it was almost inevitable that the old producer’s policy should be abandoned for a new plan evolved from the current necessity.

With reasonable logic and premise, the new policy, reversing the old phrase, said instead that business must begin to know the customer. What it meant was not the old-fashioned customer knowledge that was the asset of every country storekeeper and the aim of even the merchant prince; that was a warm, human, comfortable sort of thing. The new knowledge meant really a study of human weaknesses, utilizing on a large scale the principles of applied psychology, reasoning that if the needs and desires of potential customers might be classified, their reactions to stimuli catalogued, their weak spots listed, merchandising could be geared to sell with one gesture a thousand people where one had bought before. And so the era of consumer research, surveys, and questionnaires was born. It adapted and invented means of analyzing human traits by income groups, by ancest ry, by occupation, mobilizing figures and percentages into axioms, evolving a brand-new scheme of public manners for business. As once the producer’s policy had dominated retailing, so now the seller’s policy forced the reluctant compliance of the producer, and the majority of businesses began to watch the passersby, not the work under their hands.

III

A short time ago I was called in to consult with the manufacturer of a well-known line of silverware, whose name has been part of American business a long time. We were discussing the advisability of dropping the cheap items he had added to his line some fifteen years back, and he tossed me a letter from one of his dealers. The letter recommended the addition of a new series of pieces to be ‘made to sell for’ a certain price. The manufacturer banged his fist down hard on his desk as I returned the letter, and said, ‘That’s what is wrong with business to-day. The retailer calls for goods “made to sell” for a price. So we must start with a price and work backward, giving the best we can for the price, but never the real best we can. It’s a crazy hindside-foremost way of doing things and I’m sick of it.’

There can be no doubt that the men who are honest producers, and not just adapters or camp followers, feel more or less the same about it. Whatever were the faults of the old policy, they were at home with it as they cannot possibly be with the new. That the producer’s formula had imperfections is plain, for it can so easily turn into a policy of isolation. In tired or unguarded hands it can become a stubborn, irrational affair which, once out of step with its market, pursues a deadly course to extinction. Less nobly but as unhappily it can become for the small-town storekeeper and for the small-minded business man an enveloping alibi for laziness and inaction. But the damage done by their mistakes is after all strictly personal and limited. Like some quiet suicides’ club, they end too often their own economic lives, but, except for the sorrow over their passing, no one but they themselves suffers for their failures.

I am inclined to doubt if so much can be safely said of the harm born of the weaknesses of the second policy. Confronted every day, as I am, by the demonstration of these weaknesses, I have come to dread the damage they do. The first important weak spot lies in the word ‘know,’ around which the policy is built. Now, a man may very properly speak of knowing his product; he can certainly know the materials which have gone into it, the quality of the workmanship, the cost of its production, its tested usefulness. And just as certainly these facts may be transferred to public knowledge. But when business talks about ‘knowing’ the customer, the accuracy of the verb is open to question. It is too easy to slip from the sound field of facts into the reckless game of speculation. In no sense do I mean this to be understood as a depreciation of all consumer research, but it is no professional secret that, once an inquiry abandons facts, the conclusions are merely rationalizations of the personal beliefs of an individual or a group. And in the same curious way in which a scandal starts with one fact and rolls up a snowball of speculative conclusions that completely cover the original truth, so a survey which presents simple facts about what a group of people do may roll and gather speculative conclusions as to why they do it. Common sense rejects such conclusions as reliable foundations for axioms.

The second major weakness of this seller’s policy is in the fact that since nearly 90 per cent of all this country’s buying to-day is done by women, when business talks about knowing customers it is arbitrarily talking about knowing women. However false all generalities may be, surely it will be reckoned that the most treacherous of all are those which concern women. It has always been a matter of amazement to me that so many mild, amiable men of no more than average experience with women, presumably, can become between breakfast table and office desk pompous oracles on the subject; the most ubiquitous character, indeed, in the retailing world to-day is The Man Who Knows All About Women — and none of it true. Whenever I hear such a man deliver himself solemnly of one of the popular axioms about women, I admit to an enormous curiosity concerning the feminine impacts upon his life that have fostered so strange a defense mechanism.

In any case, in these past twenty years, a mass of theories, premises, epigrams, and axioms about women, their weaknesses, faults, capacities, emotions, and mental powers, has grown into a fantastic code which governs an almost unbelievable amount of merchandising activity. It is quite safe to say that not one single purchase that a woman makes in her life is free of the influence of these strange axioms. When she walks into a store she walks into an automatic choice-maker, in which every display has been baited with one of the popular notions about her; usually when she responds to an advertisement in a newspaper she responds to what The Man Who Knows All About Women considers one of her weaknesses. Styles, sizes, colors, uses, prices, even the seasons and times of her purchases — all these are governed by four definite axioms, results of preoccupation with the fascinating subject, ‘What makes women buy?’ Set down in black and white, these axioms sound amusing; in actual practice they might also be amusing if they were not such treacherous boomerangs. The first says that all women are vain; the second says they are incurable romantics and slaves to glamour; the third says women are perennial addicts of the ‘something-for-nothing drug,’ and the last says they neither want nor understand facts about the merchandise they buy.

The third major failing of the modern sales formula is an outgrowth of the first two — an inevitable confusion. No one has a very clear idea of what he is selling, no one has a very clear idea of what he is buying. The unfortunate part about it is that confusion covers the just and the unjust alike; the pickpocket benefits by the confusion of a mob, and the honest man may not only lose his own purse but be blamed for the loss someone else suffers. In the old days, when people were accustomed to listen to the story a man had to tell about his goods, the man with a story worth telling held a distinct advantage over the man who must slip into the market on the heels of a demand prepared by his betters. But the new public relations policy, in removing the emphasis from the merchandise and placing it upon the customer, leveled this advantage to a great degree. When a thousand businesses tell their own individual stories to the public, presenting, as they can, those details which inform the public about the merchandise, the competition is fair to both consumer and producer. When a thousand businesses all tell variations of the same story-customer weaknesses, the competition is abnormal and unsound. If according to Federal law all goods had to be promoted in this manner, it would be considered hideously unfair trade practice. That it has been a voluntary custom for a generation seems scarcely credible.

IV

I have wondered what story in my files would best illustrate the actual workings of the seller’s policy in terms that would mean something to everyone. There are so many that might show dramatically one part, or another of the picture. But there is one story that touches every human life so closely and is knit so tightly into the greater part of the whole retailing epic that it stands out sharply from the others. It is the story of fabric identification, which runs like a tangled thread through a shining piece of satin.

It is a curious thing that since the beginning of civilization no man or woman has been completely free from the tyranny of fabric for one whole hour from birth to death. Its nature and characteristics have reflected changing eras and all the gamut of human vanities and reformations from the very beginning; yet its story is very simple and understandable, the expression of any family’s needs and desires.

For some thousands of years there were just four fibres known to man from which all fabrics were made.

These four great natural fibres are silk, wool, cotton, and flax. For a long, long time the fabrics woven from these fibres were uncomplicated by number or type. Custom set up fences, so to speak, between the fibres, and for most of the time each stayed respectably within its own boundaries. Common usage for many generations identified certain weaves with certain fibres, and as far back as we have records buyers accepted these terms almost interchangeably. For instance, serge and flannel meant wool, percale and print meant cotton, linen meant flax, and satin and taffeta meant silk. Our grandmothers knew their fibres in this manner, and when a lady of Victoria’s day bought her good black silk for Sunday, she could ask for taffeta, satin, or brocade and be quite certain of getting what she expected — silk. Of course cotton sporadically played the irresponsible member of society, masquerading as wool or linen, but it was never too skillfully done, and retailers of reputation refused to permit the disguise to go so far as really to confuse their customers. One of the first identifying labels to make its appearance in the retail field was the ‘100% all wool’ pledge, which protected the true fibre from imitation; and following that came labels stating the percentage of wool present when other fibres were also there. So, until some fifteen or twenty years ago, the fabric story was nearly all romantic history and very little melodrama.

You will remember that that period, twenty years ago, was the time when the great flood of newness was beginning to sweep across the country; and one of the new products to appear was a man-made fibre, made from wood pulp or cotton linters, and called rayon. This invention was definitely a remarkable and splendid gift to humanity, but unfortunately it got off to a very bad start. It was crude and ugly, it had no reputation, no background, and to tell the truth it had little practical wearability. It was speedily rejected by women, and for a time rayon was withdrawn almost completely from the market.

Then, behind the scenes, in laboratories and stylists’ offices and designers’ studios, extraordinary things began to happen to rayon. It was discovered that not only could great beauty belong to the ugly duckling, but a marvelous versatility as well. And presently rayon was ready to reenter the market with features so changed as to be literally unrecognizable even by experts. As luck would have it, the producers of rayon struck that period of which we have already talked, when the old producer’s policy had been abandoned in favor of the seller’s policy of promotion by axiom. So, instead of presenting rayon with pride and information, it was sent in through the back door, assuming the shapes of its relatives in the fibre family, permitted no character of its own.

Because one axiom states that women must have prestige in their merchandise for their vanity’s sake, a variety of things were done to give rayon prestige. It was woven, for instance, into fabrics which appeared identical with those women had long associated with silk — a fibre which had centuries of prestige behind it. As a further step toward prestige, silk mills with famous names were engaged to weave beautiful materials of rayon fibre — and market them, without further information, over the signatures of the famous silk makers. A great tide of‘taffetas,’ ‘satins,’ ‘crepes,’ ‘velvets,’ and so on, swept through the’ stores, alluring in their appearance and in their price, but with no explanation of the changed fibre source. Later this facile rayon fibre produced fabrics which looked like wool and linen, still without benefit of explanation. Facts, you will recall, are things that axiom four says women dislike and cannot understand. Then along came axioms two and three, concerned with a woman’s love of romance and glamour, and her fondness for ‘something for nothing.’ The next step obviously was to give rayon these potent appeals; so novelty fabrics were created by all sorts of mills, and the products named such charming imaginative things as ' Laughing Leaves,’ ‘Rippling Breeze,’ ‘PetalSoft,’ and ‘Angel’s Breath.’ Their promotional descriptions made every possible appeal to a woman’s axiomatic weaknesses, but what the characteristics of these delightful fabrics might be was a subject left untouched. Women, of course, are bothered and bored by information.

Finally the most confusing of all these activities appeared when certain companies producing the rayon fibre determined each to have its own name for its product. By agreement of a joint committee of manufacturers and retailers in 1923, the term ‘rayon’ was decided upon as the generic term for the man-made fibre produced from a vegetable cellulose base regardless of the process by which it was made. But suddenly one company insisted that their product was not rayon at all, but ‘ Celanese,’ another said theirs was not rayon but ‘Bemberg,’ another said theirs was ‘Acele,’ and so on until even the word ‘acetate,’ which is no more than a descriptive term relating to a chemical process, was presented as a name for a new fibre. That there are to-day still just five fibres, and every fabric made must be formed of one or more of these, is the simple fact. But so great is the existing confusion that the average consumer imagines despairingly that there must be fifty fibres, all of them sleight-of-hand artists. And if you add to this muddle the fact that for every single fabric being made thirty years ago something like a hundred are being made to-day, you will have some idea of what the situation is.

A fair question usually asked at this point in the story is, ‘Does it matter, really, what the fibre source of a fabric happens to be if it serves the purpose?’ The answer is decidedly yes. In two ways it matters. First, because each fibre has definite generic characteristics. You expect warmth from wool, for instance, but you know it must be washed cautiously; you use linen for strength and coolness, but you know it crushes easily; cotton is easy to wash, cool and inexpensive. And of the two fibres, silk and rayon, the same thing is true — each has inherent qualities that cannot be exchanged. To mention two, rayon has one third to one half the elasticity of silk, which is why hosiery is usually made of silk. Rayon also has one third to one half the strength of silk, losing 40 to 70 per cent of that when wet — which is why rayon fabrics must be handled carefully when they are being washed. Indeed, it is decidedly in the care of fabrics, laundering them, dry-cleaning them, pressing them, that fibre identity becomes very vital to consumer satisfaction.

But even if these things were not true, nothing could change the fact that it is the inalienable right of the buyer to know what he buys. Anything else is either benevolent paternalism or chicanery.

One final point must be made before we turn to a consideration of the effects upon consumers of the great modern seller’s policy. On my desk before me as I write this are half-a-dozen advertisements out of several hundred in my files, clipped more or less at random from newspapers all over the country. The advertisements are from large and reputable stores and must be placed in evidence. One is the announcement of a sale of evening wraps, involving six fabrics. Five of them have footnotes explaining that they are ‘Celanese,’ with no explanation that ‘Celanese’ is the trade name of a rayon yarn, but the sixth is listed as silk crepe with no footnote. The testing laboratory, however, says this fabric is 100 per cent rayon. Another advertisement talks with some subtlety about a new fall fabric, ‘silk-spun and supple-soft.’ I have often wondered what the dry-cleaners did with that frock, for the laboratory tests say it is half wool and half rayon. A third piece of copy offers some very handsome ‘linen silk’ dresses at an astonishingly low price — but tests say that the fabric is neither linen nor silk, but rayon. And here is a masterpiece of the seller’s policy, for it certainly uses every axiom in its appeals. The fabric has a fanciful name, ‘magic-lite,’ and after introductory and glamorous adjectives the description says it ‘combines the texture of linen, the soft drape of sheer woolen and the richness of silk.’ I leave you to speculate as to what its fibre source actually was.

The final exhibit is to me a particularly sad and unhappy one. It is an advertisement of a fine old store whose founder was a great and punctiliously honest man, gone now, but once a builder of retail history. The advertisement is large, and across its head runs the word ‘silk’ in large letters. Below is a paragraph extolling the virtues of silk, ‘leading all other fabrics in wearability.’ Three silk fabrics are featured. According to the laboratory, none is really silk. And if you wonder with something of a shock how much of this misrepresentation is intentional, I can only remind you that confusion offers great opportunities for temporary profit.

V

I said some pages back that I did not believe it could truthfully be said that the damage growing out of the weaknesses of the seller’s policy hurts no one but its followers. That is actually a serious understatement. The damage it fosters is so broad and so deep that it threatens revolutionary changes and the ruin of many lives. No one with any economic awareness can fail to recognize that there is a large and growing unrest among consumers. The fact that in the past year consumer cooperatives accounted for some five hundred millions of retail business in direct competition with private retail firms is to me less threatening than the increasingly vocal rumblings of suspicion and doubt — of products, of retailers, of advertising. In the course of a year I am called upon to make many talks to women’s clubs, in many parts of the country; and in the past year the requests for discussion of consumer facts, advertising practices, and related subjects have been overwhelming in number. Furthermore, my work involves knowing many thousands of women, shopping for them, writing for them, hearing their complaints and problems. I cannot escape knowing that their minds are being steadily prepared for the first agreeable substitute for retailing, as we know it, that comes along.

The trouble lies chiefly in the axioms of the modern public relations policy. They are worse than false; they are half-truths. No one knows better than a woman that she responds to glamour and romance; no one knows better than she does that vanity is part of being a woman. But what the axioms overlook is that women are also realists. Almost from the day she is born a woman faces appalling facts with equanimity; to ignore that is to court her distrust. And born in her blood and bred in her bone is her belief in her right to know what she buys; to threaten that is to court her active antagonism.

I have small patience with pseudocrusaders who condemn all things that are successful, and still less with selfstyled consumers’ friends who automatically find something ill with everything advertised and sold for a profit. Both sorts betray consumer confidence more destructively than any dishonest producer or retailer possibly can. With every day of my life, year in and year out, spent with the merchandise of every field that comes into the market for retail, I have excellent reason to know that most things offered the consumers of this country are good and reliable. The rebellion of buyers is not against merchandise but against the manner of its presentation. It is my serious conviction that the real producers of this country have never approved or trusted the new seller’s policy. There is in literal fact a decided trend among them toward a return to the old formula of letting the customer know the business. That the new policy produces great volume and swift success is undeniable; if with the new technique and modern media for spreading news rapidly could be allied the fine old producer’s policy of pride in the products and belief in the intelligence of the buyer, a new era of sound profit and secure volume would meet the effort.

It is soberly true that business has turned the wrong side of its face to the street too long. The buyers of this country are hungry for products, stores, services, men they can trust. They want not just cheap things, but good cheap things; not just glamour, but honest worth beneath it. They want advertising to be a man’s written word of honor. They want to know the man and his business. The urgency for these things is so great it cannot be ignored much longer by seller or producer.

There are, after all, just two public relations policies. Business may watch the passers-by or the work under its hands. And although old Charley Davenport will never make his anvil ring again, the world seems to be rediscovering the parable of the Wall-eyed Cobbler and the face he turned to the street.