Romances of Modern Business 
CHAPTER IX 
Introducing the Dutch Boy 
All of you who read these lines are familiar with the 
Dutch Boy Painter. He is a happy, healthy little fel¬ 
low, radiating a buoyant youthfulness and teaching in¬ 
dustry and home pride. The story of the Dutch Boy is 
interesting, and this chapter of the “Romances of Modern 
Business” has been set aside to tell how he and his object 
lesson came into being. 
One day, seven years ago, a number of men were 
grouped about a table in an office in New York City. 
They were the directors of a company which was in the 
peculiar position of having an article of merchandise 
distributed throughout the country but lacking a mark 
of identification as the output of the company. 
The question puzzling these men was how to retain 
certain old trade-marks which had become sectionally 
famous for white lead and, at the same time, seize the 
advantages of nationalization offered by the consolidated 
organization, the National Lead Company. Abandon¬ 
ment of the old trade-marks, the directors reasoned, would 
be playing into the hands of competitors; for, though each 
of these long-used brands was supreme in its territory, 
not one of them had a national distribution. 
Several plans had been considered from time to time 
and abandoned as inadequate. The directors at this 
meeting heard the suggestions of a new advertising man¬ 
ager, which were, in substance: “Retain all the old brands 
as factory marks on the head of the keg, but place one 
new and uniform mark on the sides of all kegs from all 
factories. And advertise the change! This will add the 
national prestige of a uniform, universally-distributed 
identification mark to the local prestige of each brand.” 
The directors adopted this plan, and at the same 
meeting the Dutch Boy Painter, the design which has 
since become famous, was selected as the national trade¬ 
mark of the company. 
This was in September, 1907. By January first, of 
the following year, everything was ready for launching 
the new trade-mark on all the white lead manufactured 
by the National Lead Company. The February peri¬ 
odicals carried full-page announcements of the trade¬ 
mark and its significance in the white lead business. 
The Dutch Boy Painter thus began his ministrations as 
an apostle of beauty, cleanliness, and preservation; and 
he since has served as a vigorous little educator. 
The Dutch Boy advertising was immediately effective. 
Only two issues of the • magazines and weeklies bearing 
the announcement of the trade-mark were out when 
dealers began to report refusals on the part of their 
customers to buy white lead without this new trade-mark 
—this, too, in spite of the fact that the old factory brand 
was on the head of the keg as it always had been. With¬ 
in a few months the periodicals had created a national 
interest in Dutch Boy White Lead. 
The National Lead Company uses most of the prin¬ 
cipal media of advertising, but the nationally-circulated 
magazines and weeklies have always figured as the back¬ 
bone of the annual campaigns. This is because an im¬ 
portant feature of the company’s advertising is educa¬ 
tional, and the periodicals have demonstrated then- 
power in the field of education. White lead is not an 
article of every-day use in any household. Houses are 
painted only once in three or four years. Therefore, the 
value of white lead in painting must be told over and 
over again, whereas in the case of another product the 
repetition of the name may be sufficient. 
“The advertising of a concern with a product like ours 
is responsible for a very definite result,” said Mr. O. C. 
Harn, advertising manager of the National Lead Com¬ 
pany, “but that result is in some respects different from 
the one aimed at by the advertiser of other commodities. 
The great bulk of white lead is paid for by the man who 
does not buy it—that is, he does not buy it as white lead. 
What he buys and pays for is a finished job of painting, 
of which the white lead is the most important part. 
“Why, then, should we advertise to the property- 
owner? Why not advertise only to the painter who 
buys the material ? It is because we have found that the 
most powerful influence which can be brought to bear 
upon the painter is to invest him with a conviction that 
his patrons prefer Dutch Boy White Lead and expect 
him to use it. This we have been able to do through our 
educational work in the national periodicals.” 
This is the ninth of a series of articles that is being published to show how 
magazine advertising is serving the public. 
