The Coming of National Advertising: The Producer

At the outset of the 1800s, selling impetus surrounded manufacturers. They had just emerged from a decade that had seen the invention of the telephone and the incandescent lamp and significant innovations in factory production. In 1880 alone, there were applications for more than 13,000 copyrights and patents, giving rise to an ever-increasing stream of new products from mill and factory. Manufacturers found railroad mileage increasing at a rate never before seen in the history of the country, linking an ever-growing number of new markets with production centers on 70,000 new miles of track in the decade of the 1880s alone, At the end of those tracks were more customers than ever before, a rising “middle class” with greater purchasing power to fulfill wants that had been impossible even a decade before.

Manufacturers wanted the profits this climate could provide, but realized that as long as wholesalers were in a position to dictate pricing they were largely powerless. In order to change this situation, they first had to differentiate their products- bring them out of the “cracker barrel”. A product needed an identifying name or brand by which the customer could recognize it. This in turn necessitated a container of some sort on which to existence of the product, discuss its virtues, and tell them its name.

As the customer came to ask for the product by brand the product began to be pulled through the distribution system by customer by demand. Thus, there is strong historical evidence to suggest that national advertising not to increase sales per se but to gain economic control of the marketing process.

The function of the middleman was, of course, altered significantly by the manufacturer’s decision to assume a successful selling function. Patent medicines had earlier achieved an admiral position by countering wholesaler objections with the control of the patent necessary to produce the commodity, and successful differentiation through brands. Manufacturers, by stimulating selective demand for their products, forced the wholesalers to continue their basic distribution functions as a matter of economic self-interest.

The emergence of producers as a selling force and the product demand created by the manufacturers’ national advertising could well have been significant factors in the decision of many of the emerging department, specially, and chain stores to bypass the wholesalers entirely and goods directly from the manufacturers in bulk lots with assurance that the manufacturers’ selling efforts would facilitate steady sales in the retail outlets.