Word: gm
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...barrage of entertaining booklets make readers friendly toward GM by asking their advice. An important contribution to GM merchandising was Weaver's finding out how customers like to have their cars serviced passing the information on to GM dealers. Many of his mailings have been planned not so much to get information as to sell cars by stirring up interest in a laggard territory...
Weaver's own answer to such criticism is that his type of customer research must not be regarded merely as a functional activity, but as an operating philosophy which pervades every GM activity. He likes to regard himself as a symbol of a growing trend in Big Business to consider every corporate action, no matter how trivial, from the point of view of how it affects the public. Under this theory public relations becomes an integral part of any manufacturing function, even research. GM baldly admits this: though Henry Weaver's boss is Richard H. Grant, vice president...
...Haynes Automobile Co., lost some money but learned how to be an executive in the short-lived Sun Motor Car Co., finally hitched his trailer to a star in 1918 by joining Hyatt Roller Bearing Co. then headed by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.* When Hyatt was taken over by GM, Weaver was put to work on sales statistics and market analyses. In 1925 he won a Harvard Award for Market Research for a study of quantitative markets...
...GM's psychology king, available for ideas on any subject. Though he met some opposition at first, he put over himself and his ideas with the same technique he uses on the public-a steady flow of booklets, memos and "Thought Starters" (little Aesop-like homilies pointing up sound sales morals) circulated within the organization. Pretty far down the line on GM's organizational chart, Buck Weaver gets only about $20,000 a year salary...
Arriving at the GM Building about nine, Weaver lopes down the long corridor with a mess of manila folders under his arm, a cigaret stub in his nervous mouth. To preserve his more-or-less professorial role in a high-pressure company, he dresses with studied informality-slouch hat, tweedy, sloppy suit. He is short, bowlegged, has Clark Gable ears and hair cropped short because it tends to be kinky...