Word: salesmanship
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...many politicians today would make at their peril. Once such a line might have brought down the house, but nowadays it comes uncomfortably close to the truth-not about corruption, but about a far more costly phenomenon: campaign expenditures. The growing dominance of TV on every level of political salesmanship has raised campaign costs astronomically and convinced the public that politics really is a rich man's game. Even running for a modest office like, for instance, Congressman from the First District in Utah, requires at least $70,000; in a few hotly contested urban constituencies, the cost...
...engine. In 1968 Rolls-Royce won an international competition to build the engines for the Lockheed L-1011 airbus, a 256-pas-senger trijet that is supposed to start flying for TWA and Eastern late this fall. Britons had hailed the contract award as a triumph of export salesmanship by Rolls, but it proved instead to be ruinous. Rolls agreed to deliver 540 engines for the "TriStar" at a fixed price of $156 million; by last November it had concluded that the cost of building them would be more than twice that. It asked the British government for help...
...course, did not originate political salesmanship. Portraying politicians in the best possible light is as old as politics, and many of today's ploys are merely electronic adaptations of old-fashioned tactics. But TV has the power to magnify mummery beyond the wildest huckster's dream of a generation ago. Political advertising frankly approximates product advertising, merely substituting candidate for product. More and more it makes its appeal with the tactics of commercial advertising-with spots of less than 60 seconds on shows calculated to have the right viewers for the pitch. In New Jersey, where Republican Nelson...
...selling in a home market that is virtually closed to foreign competition, then use these profits to subsidize cut-price export sales. The Japanese exporters also get more government help. JETRO, a government-financed trade-promotion agency, conducts extensive surveys that the Germans say pinpoint markets vulnerable to Japanese salesmanship. The Japanese reply that the Germans have simply been complacent...
Today's consumer is better educated than his forebears and thus less willing to accept the exaggerated salesmanship, misleading advertising, shoddy goods and even bits of deceit that buyers once considered natural hazards of commerce. He is justifiably confused by product guarantees written in incomprehensible legalese, by conflicting claims