Changing Methods in the Marketing of Industrial Equipment

Abstract

IN THIS country we have become leaders in the invention of new and improved products. We have devised machinery and shop systems to make these products well, and in quantities and (considering our high wage scales) at prices that have never been equalled anywhere. We have developed the art of merchandising these products in parallel with our ability to produce them. We have preached the gospel of consumption-Buy new and improved goods rather than continue to use old and inferior ones. We have shortened the period of use and, although the salesman may tell you that an article will last a lifetime, he knows perfectly well that within the next five years the present model will be out-moded. We have continually broadened the scope of merchandising until it includes products which a few years ago would not be classed as merchandise at all, but rather fell in the classification of capital goods. There has, in brief, been unleashed, within the present century so great an inventive, productive and merchandising skill that our accomplishments in this direction stand out as a leading characteristic of our people and our time. With each advance of invention and the ensuing productive and merchandising facilities, there has been necessarily an increased investment in productive equipment. The primitive factory consisted of little beyond a building, work benches, and small tools. Today it consists of a complicated and inter-related system of productive machinery, which usually entirely overshadows in cost the building which houses it or the land upon which it rests. Moreover, with products changing and new ones being introduced, this large investment in tools, equipment and other instruments of production tends constantly to become less stable. Not only must new tools be bought to make new products, but new tools are being devised to make existing products better and cheaper. Obsolescence in productive equipment, therefore, is an evergrowing factor. While these things have gone on and we have been so busy inventing, producing in mass, and merchandising in volume the everincreasing list of merchandising goods, we have given relatively little thought to the problems involved in distributing machinery and equipment which forms a continually increasing share in the capital goods groups. Each individual manufacturer of equipment has had very largely to solve his own problems as best he could. While our libraries are stocked with books on merchandising courses of instruction are available in any large city or through the mails, societies and clubs meet to discuss merchandising, and expert marketing counselors are widely available, we find comparatively little written or spoken about this big problem of distribution of machinery and equipment in the field of capital goods. It is safe to say that had productive equipment been more intelligently bought and sold during the years preceding the depression, our national business would not have sunk to so low a level. Furthermore, our leading economists tell us today that business in this country will not return to normal until industry buys an appreciably greater volume of capital goods consisting of equipment necessary for manufacture, mining, power generation, transportation and construction.