I have been digging in some of the Old Town Canoe Company factory records again and thought that the attached chart might interest someone else here. My research started with some old cards that had a record of the inquiries from 1914 to 1948 as shown in the blue line. It clearly shows the devastating impact of both World Wars along with a rough idea of how many catalogs were printed and mailed out annually. The next column of figures on the cards had a series of numbers that I’m guessing is the annual advertising expense by year as shown by the red line. (They didn’t print a new catalog in 1944 so this seems like a reasonable interpretation.) The black line shows the end result of unit canoes sales for each year (which probably includes the Carleton Canoe Company totals as well). The exact unit sales totals were not recorded in the corporate secretary’s notes during the wars (1918-1919 and 1944-1945) so I estimated those from the production numbers. The actual totals were probably lower than these estimates. They spent an average of over $14K annually on advertising. About $0.70 of each advertising dollar produced one inquiry and one out of every five inquiries resulted in the sale of a canoe.
This was a period of significant inflation and pricing gyrations so I added the price of an 18 foot Guide’s model in the yellow line and the Consumer Price Index in the green line over the same years for comparison. (These prices were both multiplied by 100 to get the scales to match the range of the other numbers.) The page at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/guide/ has more detail about the source of these pricing numbers. The average canoe's price over this period is just over $81 so each one sold had to cover just under $4 in advertising costs.
Thoughts?
Benson
This was a period of significant inflation and pricing gyrations so I added the price of an 18 foot Guide’s model in the yellow line and the Consumer Price Index in the green line over the same years for comparison. (These prices were both multiplied by 100 to get the scales to match the range of the other numbers.) The page at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/guide/ has more detail about the source of these pricing numbers. The average canoe's price over this period is just over $81 so each one sold had to cover just under $4 in advertising costs.
Thoughts?
Benson