one—tomorrow they'll get another. You cannot cope with their competition because you haven't the weapon with which to oppose it. You can't untie your Gordian knot because it can't be untied—you've got to cut it.

You must become an advertiser or you must pay the penalty of incompetence.

You not only require the newspaper to fight for a more hopeful tomorrow, but to keep today's situation from becoming hopeless.

If It Fits You, Wear this Cap

If It Fits You, Wear this Cap

Advertising isn't a crucible with which lazy, bigoted and incapable merchants can turn incompetency into success—but one into which brains and tenacity and courage can be poured and changed into dollars. It is only a short cut across the fields—not a moving platform. You can't “get there” without “going some.”

It's a game in which the worker—not the shirker—gets rich.

By its measurement every man stands for what he is and for what he does, not for what he was and what he did.

Every day in the advertising world is another day and has to be taken care of with the same energy as its yesterday.

The quitter can't survive where the plugger has the ghost of a chance.

Advertising doesn't take the place of business talent or business management. It simply tells what a business is and how it is managed. The snob whose father created and who is content to live on what was handed to him, can't stand up against the man who knows he must build for himself.

What makes you think that you are entitled to prosper as well as a competitor who works twice as hard for his prosperity?

Why should as many people deal at your store, as patronize a shop that makes an endeavor to get their trade and shows them that it is worth while to come to its doors?

Why should a newspaper send as many customers to you, in half the time it took to fill an establishment which advertised twice as long and paid twice as much for its publicity?

This is the day when the best man wins—after he proves that he is the best man—when the best store wins, when it has shown that it is the best store—when the best goods win, after they've been demonstrated to be the best goods.

If you want the plum you can't get it by lying under the tree with your mouth open waiting for it to drop—too many other men are willing to climb out on the limb and risk their necks in their eagerness to get it away from you.

It is a man's game—this advertising—just hanging on and tugging and straining all the time to get and keep ahead. It is the finite expression of the law of Competition, which sits in blind-folded justice over the markets of the world.

You Must Irrigate Your Neighborhood

You Must Irrigate Your Neighborhood

Half a century ago there were ten million acres of land, within a thousand miles of Chicago, upon which not even a blade of grass would grow. Today upon these very deserts are wonderful orchards and tremendous wheatfields. The soil itself was full of possibilities. What the land needed was water. In time there came farmers who knew that they could not expect the streams to come to them, and so they dug ditches and led the water to their properties from the surrounding rivers and lakes; they tilled the earth with their brains as well as their plows—they became rich through irrigation.

Advertising has made thousands of men rich, just because they recognized the possibilities of utilizing the newspapers to bring streams of buyers into neighborhoods that could be made busy locations by irrigation—by drawing people from other sections.

The successful retailer is the man who keeps the stream of purchasers coming his way. It isn't the spot itself that makes the store pay—it's the man who makes the spot pay. Centers of trade are not selected by the public—they are created by the force which controls the public—the newspapers.

New neighborhoods for business are being constantly built up by men who have located themselves in streets which they have changed from deserted by-ways into teeming, jostling thoroughfares, through advertising irrigation.

The storekeeper who whines that his neighborhood holds him back is squinting at the truth—he is hurting the neighborhood.

If it lacks streams of buyers, he can easily enough secure them by reaching out through the columns of the daily and inducing people from other sections to come to him. Every time he influences a customer of a competitor he is not only irrigating his own field but is diverting the streams upon which a non-advertising merchant depends for existence. Men and women who live next door to a shop that does not plead for their custom will eventually be drawn to an establishment miles away because they have been made to believe in some advantage to be gained thereby.

The circulation of every daily is nothing less than a reservoir of buyers, from which shoppers stream in the direction that promises the most value for the least money.

The magic development of the desert lands, has its parallel in merchandising of men who consider the newspaper an irrigating power which can make two customers grow where one grew before.

Cato's Follow-up System

Cato's Follow-up System

If a man lambasted you on the eye and walked away and waited a week before he repeated the performance, he wouldn't hurt you very badly. Between attacks you would have an opportunity to recover from the effect of the first blow.

But if he smashed you and kept mauling, each impact of his fist would find you less able to stand the hammering, and a half-dozen jabs would probably knock you down.

Now advertising is, after all, a matter of hitting the eye of the public. If you allow too great an interval to elapse between insertions of copy the effect of the first advertisement will have worn away by the time you hit again. You may continue your scattered talks over a stretch of years, but you will not derive the same benefit that would result from a greater concentration. In other words, by appearing in print