Word: salesmanship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brokerage firms are resorting to some old-fashioned salesmanship to win back their wayward customers. Steve Hasbrouck, national sales manager for Cleveland-based Prescott, Ball & Turben, tells his brokers to meet with their clients in person rather than make perfunctory phone calls. Says Hasbrouck: "They're much better off sitting down with the client and his family over a cup of coffee." Hasbrouck's brokers, like most in the industry today, inquire more carefully about their customers' financial needs, asking about plans for retirement or children's college education. Brokers need their old clients, and the customers know...
...work has sometimes been complicit with the indulgences of the day, it was never fully in service to them. He never aimed for the lugubrious swank of Helmut Newton, whose corseted women can look like sale goods in a fancy furniture store. He never settled for the sexual salesmanship of Bruce Weber, whose boys live in a world made of equal parts Ralph Lauren and Leni Riefenstahl...
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, for example, uses the prism of salesmanship to capture the petty expectations of my parents' generation. Over the years, the travelling salesman has vanished from the cultural landscape, as abruptly as a stern shut of the front door. But the image of getting by on "shoe-shine and a smile," as Miller wrote, still remains. Tom Wolfe, today's Class Day speaker, is in part responsible for updating that American classic...
...Kennedy School acquired its name and much of its endowment in 1966 from a bequest by the late President's family. But its greatest growth has come since 1977, when Graham Allison, an academic with a flair for salesmanship, became dean. Since then, the faculty has increased from 12 to 85 and the student body from 200 to 700 degree students, along with 600 nondegree students. The school's modern red brick complex on the banks of the Charles River contains nine research centers, ranging from the Center for Science and International Affairs to the Institute for the Study...
...most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives...