Word: weavers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Propaganda. The Motorist's Handbook demonstrates that GM's customer research is not merely a fact-finding project. It is also a highly polished sales and propaganda device. And there is no question that the selling aspects of Weaver's activities are fully as valuable to GM as the research findings...
...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...
...this, Buck Weaver stoutly maintains, does not impair the scientific value of his findings. Some other market research experts disagree: and though they give him credit for doing more to popularize market research than anyone else, they declare that he could find out just as much without as much fuss...
...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...
Idea Man. Henry Weaver at 48 has been in the automobile business ever since he got out of Georgia Tech in 1911, returned to Eatonton to run a garage. Presently he became a mechanic in Detroit's early motor companies, got fired with monotonous regularity until he branched into sales. He did a turn as draftsman with 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...