The problem of mounting cost

Other marketing costs are also growing at a faster rate than it is possible to increase prices. Advertising and promotion costs have increased. The trend towards substituting advertising for personal selling and for retail store-selling may well have to be reversed. The public pays for all such costs, and it is asking pointedly whether such costs are, in fact, justified.
Management must find a way of measuring more accurately what advertising and promotional expenditures actually accomplish. There is demand for study as to whether a reduction in price of goods might not accomplish as much, or even more.
Sales expenses, too, have mounted. Marketing has become a complicated activity, and the application of sales techniques in the field is a complicated and subtle activity today. Better accounting management has also resulted in more realistic cost allocations, and many specific costs are being charged to selling expenses that previously were absorbed in the mysterious overhead, miscellaneous, or general accounts. For more realistic cost accounting, we have to have the proper organization and the proper selection, training and supervision of the sales force.
Man¬agement anticipates the need of greatly expanded sales research and distribution auditing. The location and relocation of sales forces to follow shifts in population and markets, the significant changes in distribution channels, the disappearance of many products and the introduction of new ones, all will call for expanded research operations.
A vast new science of color and of styling is developing, adding greatly to consumer choice, but also to cost. There is need also for closer profit analysis, by markets, by products, by territories, and by channels of distribution.
Marketing management is likewise faced with the necessity of studying price and price reactions more deeply than has been done in the past. Consumer income and demand will be watched with special care to determine reaction to price both in theory and in practice in the market.
Much more will have to be known concerning geographic differences in demand. The regionalizing of magazine advertising is only a beginning in the direction of sectionalizing markets. Market segmentation will require greater attention to local differences than in the past. Some way must be developed of making mass production economies available on a mass- marketing basis to individual buyers in different sections of the country.
In the elimination of waste in distribution, attention will also have to be paid to methods, tactics and practices of the distributors, both wholesale and retail. A more realistic division of the distribution job may have to be made. Perhaps manufacturers' advertising and promotion will be limited to the job of promoting sales, while the advertising and promotion of wholesalers and retailers will be concentrated on the job of making sales.