PUBLICITY THAT BEATS COMPETITION 183 
In the past this faulty advertising was not so important. 
In the pioneer stages of retail distribution rough methods 
were still effective. But this is no longer true. Powerful 
distribution organizations, soundly conceived and ably 
operated, are competing with all of us to a degree never 
known before. We can no longer expect to continue profit- 
ably in business if we use wasteful methods. While we go 
along in the old way of advertising, the chain stores are 
taking our established lines of merchandise away from us, 
one by one, on the basis of good values all through their 
stocks. Our fallacious ideas of how to advertise interfere 
with the profitable readjustment of our businesses, whether 
large or small, to these new, threatening conditions of 
competition. When we begin to advertise more ably under 
the Model Stock Plan, this new program will carry us along 
rapidly toward meeting this growing chain competition and 
toward greater total profits. 
We agree, then, that the best advertising approach for our 
store is to create among customers an understanding that 
the Model Stock Plan is constantly at work to afford them 
the best values and the best styles in complete assortments 
of the goods they want at the prices they are most able and 
willing to pay. We must be careful not to allow any 
idea, no matter how it may glitter, to distract us from 
this basic conception of the proper advertising policy for 
our store. 
We should be warned by the mistakes of other people who, 
having painstakingly built a substantial goodwill, allow 
themselves to be diverted to a shift that endangers their 
hard-won advantages. As this is written, the most recent 
and probably the most conspicuous instance of all time was 
Woolworth’s advertising which appeared in national maga- 
zines of large circulation in 1929. 
For years Woolworth’s had been building up in the public 
consciousness a firm belief that every article offered for sale 
in Woolworth’s stocks was exceptional value. Then, out of 
a clear sky, came a tremendous volume of advertising that 
in essence—though not, of course, in so many words—told