Page 213 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

A good plan for getting your store known in a district is to appear before the
natural history classes in grammar and high schools several times annually,
giving a talk upon the care and feeding of fish, and the many interesting
features of owning fish. Such talks might profitably be given at church
gatherings and women’s clubs also. Handling as a side line such items as
home aquariums, plants, fish food, decorative shells and aquarium ornaments
add greatly to the profits of this interesting enterprise.

chapter eIght
PROMOTING A SMALL BUSINESS
I

T IS a precept of business that goods well bought are half sold, and that any
man who builds a better mouse trap than his neighbor will have a path worn
to his door. Like most business maxims these are only half true. No matter
how desirable the thing you are selling may be, your ability to sell it is in
direct proportion to the number of people who know what you have to offer.
The job of spreading that news is, for want of a better expression, called
“promoting a business.”
It is only within the last few years that the possibilities of “promotions”

have been fully realized by business men. For a decade or more before the
depression business men talked a great deal about the power of advertising.
Advertising was held up as the modern Aladdin’s lamp that brought success
to all who touched it. Advertising still is a powerful business force. But
gradually men have come to appreciate that advertising alone is not enough.
It is just one of a number of ways to promote a business. And so we find in
the up-to-date business not only a man in charge of advertising, but working
hand-in-hand with him, a man in charge of promotion.

The use of “promotions” as a means of short-cutting the good-will building
process, and increasing what is called “store traffic,” has reached its highest
state of development in the department store field. Here we find the
management always searching for new ideas and thinking up all sorts of
things to bring people into their stores, and to get themselves talked about.
One Chicago store, for example, spent thousands of dollars to put on a