Hard Sell

Colin Clark

Description

Market pitchers routinely transform a patch of bare ground into a sea of eager purchasers using little more than their 'gift of the gab' and some homespun 'psychology' to convince passers-by to stop and buy their goods. Employing some of the world's most successful selling techniques, in one of the oldest and most difficult of all marketing situations, their rhetoric and social skills have to equal that employed by the most accomplished salespersons, politicians and professional persuaders. Between 1984 and 1994 sociologists Clark and Pinch recorded over 75 pitching routines on street markets and other sales sites throughout the UK, mainland Europe and the United States. Using examples of pitchers attracting a crowd, describing and demonstrating their goods, building bargains, cajoling the unconvinced to make a purchase and coping with problem customers, the authors reveal, for the very first time, the reasons for these traders' extraordinary success-both on and away from the markets. Comparing their findings with more orthodox sales situations-direct response TV home shopping and infomercials, as well as other forms of grass-roots selling (fly pitching, the mock auction sales con, street entertaining and urban 'hustling')-the authors highlight many important lessons that have relevance for everyone involved in all types of marketing, advertising and persuasion.In this revised, updated and extended edition the authors also reveal why, today, pitching on markets appears to have become a dying art. Original, authoritative and highly readable, The Hard Sell is an essential and often hilarious guide for anyone who wants to understand how real-life selling really works.

Sujets

• Marketing et communication

Informations

• Publié par: Sociografica
• Date de parution: 01 août 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780957534728
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE HARD SELL
The Language and Lessons of Streetwise Marketing
Colin Clark is Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Business Communication at the University of Aberdeen Business School, Scotland, UK.
Trevor Pinch is Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, USA.
THE HARD SELL: THE LANGUAGE AND LESSONS OF STREETWISE MARKETING
Originally published in Great Britain in 1995 by HarperCollins Publishers
This revised, updated and extended edition published in 2014 by Sociografica Publishing Ltd
Holborn House, 88-90 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8PG
www.sociografica.com
Copyright © Colin Clark and Trevor Pinch 2014
Colin Clark and Trevor Pinch assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Condition of Sale
All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, criticism or review permitted by copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise—without the prior permission, in writing, of the authors and publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the Copyright Lending Agency. All enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at www.sociografica.com .
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-9575347-0-4 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-9575347-1-1 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-0-9575347-2-8 (e-Pub)
THE
HARD SELL
The Language and Lessons of Streetwise Marketing
Colin Clark and Trevor Pinch
What the experts think of the revised, updated and extended edition of The Hard Sell
“Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Let Colin Clark and Trevor Pinch tell you all about the market and sidewalk pitchmen—the guys who may just sell you something you don’t want for more than you ever thought you’d pay. Take advantage of the many hours and days of intensive observation and deep thinking the authors did to produce this brilliant example of theoretically informed participant observation. This book is really a kick. I loved it. Buy two copies of The Hard Sell and give one to a friend!”
Professor Howard S. Becker (PhD, University of Chicago, 1951) is a sociologist, educator and musician. His books include: Outsiders (1963), Art Worlds (1982), Writing for Social Scientists (1986), Tricks of the Trade (1998) and (with Robert R. Faulkner) Do You Know . . . ? The Jazz Repertoire in Action (2009). He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
“Almost everything we do in our daily lives involves some form of selling and persuasion. In my line of work I’m continually trying to sell TV shows, or ideas, or myself and my company. Tonight, like many other people, I’ll probably also have to summon up a whole sales pitch about why we need to watch the football instead of Coronation Street. Before I started writing for television I worked for twenty years on the markets where, if you couldn’t sell, you didn’t eat. This fabulous book is about how some of the world’s most gifted and successful salespeople accomplish their extraordinary feats of selling in one of the most difficult of all marketing situations, and it’s been written by two academics who left their ‘ivory tower’ and bothered to spend some time seriously studying real salespeople doing their jobs out there in the real world.”
Tony Jordan , Director, Red Planet Pictures (recent production credits include BBC TV’s Death in Paradise and By Any Means); former lead writer and story consultant for BBC TV’s EastEnders; creator of TV series including Hustle, Holby Blue and The Nativity; co-creator of Life on Mars; former trader and pitcher on English street markets.
“Without any doubt The Hard Sell is the best and most in-depth study of the dying art of market pitching ever published. The astonishing level of detail and quality of Clark and Pinch’s research is bettered only by their understanding of the concepts, subtleties and unique dynamics that encompass this method of retailing—in both the street market and TV infomercial settings. Quite frankly, I am shell-shocked that two professors from outside ‘the business’ could ever have produced such a great book. As one guru in the game (who shall remain nameless) once said: ‘You never tell the Billys the cotton’. Well, with this book, Clark and Pinch should be congratulated for having done exactly that.”
John Parkin , infomercial presenter and producer; programme strategy consultant; former English street market pitcher and demonstrator.
“It’s immutable and it’s simple! Master the art of selling and every aspect of your life will be dramatically improved. The Hard Sell dissects the subtle architecture of the pitch—the ultimate of all sales tools—and it introduces you to some of the fantastic characters who are so brilliant at what they do they make successful selling look very easy. Everything you ever needed to know about selling is in these pages. It’s factual, funny and, above all, enlightening. Read it and reap—literally, because life is a pitch!”
Anthony Sullivan , Director, Sullivan Productions; infomercial presenter (with sales of well over $100 million of merchandise); creator, executive producer and co-presenter of Discovery Channel’s Pitchmen TV series; former pitcher and demonstrator on English street markets.
Contents
Preface to the 2014 edition
Photo Credits
Introduction
Key to Transcriptions
1.  Building an Edge
2.  Working a Line
3.  Building Bargains
4.  Securing Sales
5.  ‘Working the Edge’: The Subtle Art of Crowd Control
6.  If You’re Not in ‘Too Deep’ You’re Not in Deep Enough
7.  Dodgy Working—Fly Pitchers
8.  ‘Going, Going . . . Con!’: The Mock Auction Sales Fraud
9.  Street Entertainers and Urban Hustlers
10.  Tele-Shopping
Conclusion (to the first, 1995 edition)
New chapters added for the 2014 edition
11.  Declining Markets and Vanishing Pitchers
12.  Resurrection: The New Frontiers of Pitching
13.  The Prerequisites of Pitching Success
Glossary
Bibliography
Internet Resources
Photos
Index
Preface to the 2014 Edition
Aside from correcting a number of typographic errors and omissions, improving the accuracy of some of the featured transcripts, refining a few of the points we made as well as adding further comments and more recent statistics relating to changes that have taken place since 1995, the Introduction and the principal empirical sections of the original HarperCollins edition of this book (i.e. Chapters 1-10 ), remain essentially the same.
This edition, however, adds five new elements to the original text. First, we have extended many of the points we made in our 1995 Conclusion , although, in doing so, we have endeavoured to stay as close as possible to the issues and the spirit of the content at the time it was first written.
Second, there are three newly added chapters to this edition of the book. In the first of these chapters—titled ‘ Declining Markets and Vanishing Pitchers ’—we describe the various changes that have taken place in the world of pitching and markets since the first publication of our book. As we mention briefly in our Introduction , when The Hard Sell was first published we thought we had written a sociology book. Now, what you are about to read is, in some significant part, also a history book. This is because the pitchers, whose words and deeds we spent so much time documenting, have all but vanished from British markets. Nonetheless, our book describes a number of fundamental communication skills, practices and processes that still live on (and, indeed, thrive) in the twenty-first century, but do so largely in other forms and in other places. In particular, with the rise of direct response TV and online shopping we find many of the same pitching skills and techniques gaining a new lease of life in the digital world. In the second of our newly added chapters—titled ‘ Resurrection: The New Frontiers of Pitching ’—we report what actually happened to those pitchers and demonstrators who left the markets after we had completed our initial pitching study. As we will see, many of these traders prospered (to say the very least) in other work settings. The third newly added chapter—titled ‘ The Prerequisites of Pitching Success ’—examines what particular personal qualities and skills the traditional markets had nurtured in the pitchers and demonstrators that played a huge part in explaining the extraordinary successes many of these traders achieved both on and then away from the markets.
Third, in order to visually illustrate some of the points we make, we have included a number of photographs of market ‘lurkers’, demonstrators, pitchers, fly-pitchers, and patent-medicine salesmen at work. Many of these images also contain examples that highlight the different types of bodily conduct regularly displayed by the shoppers that gather at these traders’ sales sites. Also included are ‘screen-grabs’ of Direct Response TV home shopping and infomercial programmes, as well as candid shots of the authors and their colleagues (and, in particular, their video equipment) while collecting the data for the first edition of this book. Unless stated otherwise, these photographs were taken by the authors between 1984-1994.
Fourth, we have extended and updated our Bibliography to include all of the academic articles we have published on market pitching as well as other research we have conducted on selling, negotiation and business persuasion. Also included are: i) a selection of other, post-1995 academic studies of real-life selling situations; ii) updated references to newer or re-published versions of out of print or difficult to obtain books that were cited in the 1995 edition of The Hard Sell; and: i