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Why Be Creative? - Part 4

By 1975, according to most predictions, and even by 1965, according to others, most Americans will be working at their primary jobs only about thirty hours a week. Some authorities predict that annual four-week vacations will be universal. If such predictions come true, and there is every indication that they will, then the average American worker will find himself with up to 25 per cent more leisure time on his hands. The big question is, how will people use that time? The way the trend is right now, we are doomed to become a nation devoted to escapist recreation.

And what about the problems of doing business today? High taxes, high wages, and high materials costs, as well as the necessity of coping with the complications of ever-increasing technologies, are putting a real drain on the resources and resourcefulness of business executives. In many industries, profit margins are counted in pennies. And the pressures for more sales are tremendous, as are the pressures generated by competition.

Thirty-one per cent of America's top-brand consumer products in 1940 had lost their leadership by 1956. Roughly 23 per cent of this group lost their place because of competition from radi­cally new products; 31 per cent because of improved competitive products; 25 per cent because competing products were able to provide new developments of enough interest to the consumer to cause a brand change; and 23 per cent were just out advertised and out promoted. So important has competitive selling become to our business picture that Dun & Bradstreet reports that of the 9,324 business failures in the United States in the first part of 1958, "Inadequate Sales" was the most frequent reason for failure (more than twice as much as any other cause), and "Competitive Weakness" was the strong second reason. Some of the problems that a business faces in selling at a profit in our economy today are these:

Leadership. We are short of the trained and experienced executives we need to cope with the complexities of modern marketing. This has been caused, at least in part, by overemphasis on speciali­zation in the past. We find now that what we need are "general-ists"—executives who can take a broad view of the business as a whole and who have the ability to handle a wide variety of prob­lems and problem aspects.

Training. It is almost axiomatic in business operation that to increase profits, you must increase manpower efficiency. Execu­tives and selling personnel must learn to make their business hours more productive. They must learn to study and analyze their operations and responsibilities in order to achieve greater effi­ciency. This takes education, and if a company wants the benefits of that education, it will have to assume the responsibility for providing it.

Marketing. The way a product was advertised and sold yester­day may be completely outmoded today. Just the change from urban to suburban living has greatly upset many traditional con­cepts of selling and distribution and will continue to do so as our pattern of population change keeps changing.

New Products. Here lies one of the greatest challenges of all for a business seeking sales. If products are practically identical to those of a competitor, a company's potential for profits may be nearly nonexistent today. And the company is in a dangerous way so far as the future is concerned.

Related terms include business manager and small business services.