Business Marketing Advertising

Word comes from New York that the “Sell Now” movement is making great strides. The newspapers are giving liberal space to the work, and even the great metropolitan dailies and the magazines of millions of circulation are urging their readers to “Sell Now.”

What are you doing to tie up to this movement? To bring home to you the possibilities in the idea we learned the other day of an enterprising salesman for the Sealy Mattress Company, who was bitten by the “Sell Now” bug and wanted to see if the idea was any good.

So he went to a live-wire dealer in Houston, Texas, who, several weeks back, had startled the factory by selling two hundred mattresses in two days, as a result of clever advertising.

The Sealy salesman said to this dealer: “If a six-inch, double-column ad will sell 215 mattresses, I am sure that if you used six or seven times that much advertising that you would sell 1,500 mattresses.”

The dealer was paralyzed at the idea. The salesman pointed out that the advertising could be stopped if it did not pay and that he would even go so far as to send him five carloads of mattresses so that he could make a sensational display with them. And to make a long story short, the merchant finally agreed to let the goods come along and to do the advertising.

Bear in mind that this was in a locality where business is supposed to be especially slow. Other mattress sales people had made Houston and written back that there was absolutely no business to be had at any price. But the Sealy salesman knew that the people had money and that they would spend it if satisfied that the value was there.

And that is just what happened. The advertising called for great page advertisements every other day for a week to tell about these mattresses at usual rock-bottom prices. At first the buyers came slowly. Then the news began to spread over backyard fences. The crowds grew. Finally the crowds themselves attracted buyers. By the end of the week, a total of over 1,300 mattresses had been sold in a city that was in the business doldrums!