Don't Be Repulsive

As an Iowa farm boy, Stan Talbott had a slick way of convincing roadside customers that he sold only freshly laid eggs. Stan would duck into the henhouse where he kept his ready-packaged eggs, push the hens about to make them cackle, and presently reappear with the eggs carefully sprinkled with pillow feathers.

In due course Salesman Talbott became advertising vice president of Joyce, Inc., one of the world's biggest makers of women's play shoes. To get a line on women's likes & dislikes, he tried a door-to-door canvass, but busy housewives gave him the brushoff. So he packed a laundry bundle and started talking to women at self-service laundries, where they had plenty of time to kill. Besides talking, he read magazine ads to the women to see which words got a rise out of them.

Last week, 47-year-old Arthur Stanley Talbott told the Los Angeles Advertising Club the results of his survey on "How to Open Women's Purses.." Certain words in ads and sales talks are "repulsive" to women, he said. Examples: habit, bra, leathery, sticky, parched, calisthenics, crust, matron, clingy, model. Good sales words, which "appeal to women's hearts, emotions and vanities": poise, charm, graciousness, dainty, twinkle, hope, blush, bloom, bachelor, crisp, fairness, garden.

Instead of moving in with a fast sales patter, the clerk who spends "three minutes buttering up the customer can trim seven minutes off the usual 20 it takes to sell a pair of shoes," said Talbott. He also checked displays at 70 Joyce retailers, found that white light on a display "is too hard" and helps few sales, purple light even fewer ("it's old-timy"). But yellow and red lights ("warm, emotional colors") boost sales of summer shoes because they excite the "impulse buying" of women.

By following his lighting rules and using his word lists not only in ads but in sales talks as well, big Joyce retailers such as Los Angeles' Bullock's have kept sales rising, while they have been dropping in many another shoe store. Joyce's January orders were 30% higher than a year ago.

Talbott is now making a new test: showing women photographs of shoe clerks to see which sales faces they like and dislike. He expects to prove that "certain types of faces should be kept in the rear."

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