Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/14

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10
The Science of Advertising

with a favorable impression; and when she comes at last to order for herself, she cannot help still associating them so.

Now I have forgotten how many millions of children the school census tells us are now learning to read and to associate ideas. I do not know how many there were eighteen or twenty years ago and now coming, with these friends of mine, to order for themselves. But it is certain that although the advertising of such articles as Quaker-Oats, Baker's Chocolate, Heinz foods, Sapolio, and Gold Medal flour has been for years and today is markedly successful, they have had to depend most largely for their successes upon their sales to those who have had consciously and unnaturally to order their specific goods.

The orders of the most impressionable part of the public who have been reading their advertisements and the orders of those to whom the naming and requiring of advertised products is the most ready and natural thing, are yet to come in or, at best, are just beginning to come. As a very preliminary consideration, then, in accounting for the efficiency of modern advertising, we must recall first that our modern advertising as a business proposition is markedly and conspicuously successful today, though it is of necessity laying by a sinking endowment fund which would run almost any other enterprise.