Cooperation Author:Emerson Pitt Harris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: out of some other purchase, or the same satisfaction for less price, the influence which causes me to make the unwise purchase is clearly anti-social. Is the agg... more »ressive advertising selling method likely to cause consumers to buy what they ought to buy? It would seem from the nature of the case that the consumer is more likely to be induced to buy the wrong thing. In the first place, it is the more profitable article which is likely to be advertised since there is more margin out of which to pay for the advertising. The article with the smaller profit can usually be bought for less. Of course it is not always true that advertising makes a higher price necessary. In some cases advertising so increases demand as to make possible enough lower cost of production to more than pay for the extra selling expense. On the other hand, it is possible to put goods in a fancy package that appeals to the eye and then so to advertise and push them as to sell at prices materially above what the same goods are sold for in bulk. More will be said about this in our chapter on Costs.1 The same principles are applied to most other articles advertised. They are sold for more because Artificial cre- they can be, thus the consumer is led to buy Uon of new ,, .,. ., . demand the wrong thing, the more expensive. The expense of creating first a consciousness of a new want and a demand for the article to fill it is costly and the cost comes out of the consumer. The business of creating new demands is extensive. Mr. W. R. Hotchkin,2 speaking on this subject says: "It is all very well to get the sales of things that people want to buy; but that is too small in volume. We must make people want many other things, in order to get a big increase in business. So the advertising manager must have two...« less