Business Marketing Advertising

Do you keep a scrapbook? Jason Rogers, one time publisher of the New York “Globe” and one of the forward-thinking minds in the advertising business, contends that any sales people who keeps a scrapbook will close many orders that would otherwise go to his competitors.

Mr. Rogers made his first success selling advertising. In those days nobody took advertising very seriously. People thought of it in terms of Barnum and Bailey circus posters, patent medicine ads and fake fire sales. There was no such thing as a truthful circulation statement ? the best liar always had the biggest circulation.
Instead of being caught in the sinister drift of the customs of the business and playing the game as it was played all around him, Mr. Rogers decided to sell advertising on a business basis, just as the selling of any other commodity was on a business basis. And his first move was to start a scrapbook.

“I did not want to put my selling on a personal basis,” said Mr. Rogers in a success talk before the Northwestern University class in journalism. “If you do that the first man who comes along with a more likable personality than you have is pretty sure to get your business away. I wanted to build on a solid foundation. And I succeeded as an advertising salesman, not because people liked my face but because I kept scrapbooks of good advertising ideas.”

Mr. Rogers’ early success as a salesman, as well as his later success as publisher of a great metropolitan newspaper, can be directly traced to one thing ?ideas. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, the movement to advertise advertising, the flat rate for newspaper advertising, the abolishment of secret devices for cutting rates ? these are all Mr. Rogers’ ideas. But they were more than ideas in his mind ? they were ideas which his tireless energy saw completed.

As sales professionals, we must get it firmly fixed in our minds that the measure of our success depends most materially on the ideas we put into our sales work. The time has passed when we can just sell the same thing that the other fellow is selling. We must stop selling materials, and sell ideas about the materials. And the best plan of all for stimulating ideas is to keep a scrapbook. In this way you have access to the best ideas affecting your line. Merely glancing over the pages of such a book will start a flow of ideas that will do for you what ideas have done for nearly every man who stands out above the crowd.