“As a whole,the colored peoples have fewer wants,lower standards of living,little material prosperity and are not generally responsive to the same influences as the whites,”Curtis wrote in a primer on using census data in 1913.In 1922,the company reiterated its desire to reach“worth-while white families.”In developing a market index in 1923,the Advertising Department explained that because among blacks and the foreign-born there was a high percentage of illiteracy“and relatively low average of buying power,it seemed fair to base a market index primarily on native whites;but of the native whites some are ignorant and some lack the means to buy merchandise of their choice.Hence it seemed that perhaps it would be fairest to take one-half of the native whites as an index.”In other words,those people who could and did consume regularly were considered among the valuable and the elite.Those who didn't,or couldn't,were considered deficient,unable to improve themselves and their quality of life through spending.The idea was circular:Those who consumed succeeded,and those who succeeded consumed.Those who didn't consume were cast aside like the packaging on the new name-brand products.Parlin,untitled address to Western Company,type,Feb.16,1923,CP,Box 149,Folder 42;“Population Reduced to its Lowest Terms-An Estimate,”Obiter Dicta,9(December 1914),pp.3-13;Parlin,“Department Store Lines:Textiles,”vol.B,pp.44-56;Parlin,The Merchandising of Textiles(Philadelphia:National Dry Goods Association,n.d.),CP,Box 150,Folder 109;“Sales Quotas and City Markets,”Curtis Bulletin,32(November 7,1923),CP,Box 158,Folder 176.The tools of inclusion and exclusion were important to the arguments Curtis Publishing made.By excluding large segments of the population and by defining the primary target audience as families instead of individuals,it could create a smaller target audience and boost the percentage of the audience its magazines reached,thereby giving the impression of higher efficiency.That is,by excluding blacks and the foreign-born,it could reduce the U.S.population in the 1910s from about 100,000,000 individuals to about 15,000,000 native-born white families,only about 9,000,000 of which lived in the cities and suburbs-what,in 1914,it considered the“accessible”areas of the country.Curtis then cut that 9,000,000 to 4,600,000 million by factoring in incomes,saying that advertisers should target families earning$1,000 or more.“Population Reduced to its Lowest Terms-An Estimate.”
By defining its target audience and by narrowing the range of people it wanted to reach,Curtis used an early form of niche marketing,targeting not the whole of the population but only those most likely to buy a product.A market,in Curtis'terms,was only a fraction of the entire population.“The job is to find out how large that minority is-and how to reach that fraction without wasting money and effort on the unavailable majority,”the company wrote in its house organ in 1914.In marketing a product,it urged manufacturers to ask themselves three questions:How many people could use the product?How many of those people could afford to buy the product?How many of those people could profitably be reached by both advertising and mass distribution?“No product can support intensive selling effort in every nook and cranny of the nation,”the company said.“The expense would be prohibitive.The problem is to determine what to reject-what classes of the population,what geographical sections,what avenues of trade-then to concentrate selling effort on the rest.This demands,above all,careful study of the population figures.”“Population Reduced to its Lowest Terms-An Estimate.”
