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TWENTY-EIGHTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



The style and appearance of a package create the first impression 

 for your product, good or bad; and you may attach importance to this 

 or not, but I want to make the prediction that if this first impression 

 is bad, your product is next door to a failure and all the advertising on 

 earth won't save it — and it does not make much difference how good 

 your article is, either. 



If the jobber doesn't like the appearance of your product he will not 

 buy it; if Mr. Grocer doesn't like the looks of it he will probably buy 

 something else not so good that looks better to him ; and if Mrs. Con- 

 sumer is not impressed with the style of your goods, she is .going to 

 buy the goods she is impressed with — advertising or no advertising. 



The Californian who seeks a market for his product through adver- 

 tising has many points in his favor, as compared with an Eastern or 

 foreign competitor. California products are held in high esteem in the 

 Eastern market as far as these products are known; but the day has 

 gone by when quality alone will create a world market for any sort of a 

 product. Competition is too close, the inventive genius of man too 

 great, for this style of merchandising. Every shrewd business man 

 operating in the world markets to-day is taking a short cut for the 

 biggest market. He is not waiting for his goods to sell themselves. 



Most of us here can remember when Liebig's was the only beef extract 

 known. It was the extract that every physician specified; it was the 

 extract that every druggist recommended. One day, after an exhaustive 

 talk w T ith a Chicago advertising man, Mr. Philip D. Armour decided to 

 make an appropriation of $10,000 for advertising his products. What 

 has been the result? A canvass of the drug-stores shows that out of every 

 five calls for beef extract, four are for Armour's, and I suppose if the 

 investigation was carried into the other products Mr. Armour advertised, 

 the results would be the same. This does not mean that other makers 

 of beef extracts are not selling just as many or more goods as they 

 were before the Armours commenced their advertising campaign, but it 

 does mean that advertising has increased the consumption of the article. 

 The lesson in this is that there are any number of California products 

 with which business can be developed the same as the Armours have 

 developed their beef-extract trade. 



If one cares to ascertain just how great this undeveloped field for 

 California products is, ask any New York grocer what the best brand of 

 California olives or olive oil is. Nine chances out of ten he can not 

 recall the name of a single brand, good or bad. Not one retailer in a 

 hundred in the East knows one brand of California wine or one brand 

 of California fruit from another, with one or two exceptions. The 

 Eastern retailer buys these articles just exactly as a hardware mer- 

 chant buys pig-iron or as a dry-goods merchant buys so many bales 

 of cotton bats; and just as long as the marketing of California products 



