The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (25 page)

Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1867, Hawkins had grown up with a youthful interest in business which led to a position with a small kerosene company when he moved to Detroit in 1888. Within a few years, he joined the Detroit office of Standard Oil as an assistant cashier, and his exceptional talent for business soon led to a position as an accountant. Then a foolish action brought disaster. In 1894, he was convicted and sentenced to a jail term for embezzling $3,000 from Standard Oil. Convinced that the crime was an impulsive, youthful mistake—Hawkins candidly admitted the felony and apologized for it—friends in the business community assisted in getting him pardoned by the governor of Michigan in 1896, after he had served part of his prison sentence. They helped him get re-established in business, and in the late 1890s he founded the accounting firm of Hawkins, Gies, and Company. This endeavor grew steadily, and by 1904 he had an account with the new Ford Motor Company, where he impressed James Couzens with his work. Overwhelmed by the business demands of the rapidly growing company, Couzens convinced the accountant to take over its sales-and-marketing operation in November 1907. Hawkins made an immediate impact.
³⁹

With great energy and talent, he began revamping and rationalizing the entire marketing operation. Hawkins' new colleagues were overwhelmed. “God, that man had a wonderful set of brains! When he went there, he revolutionized the old sales division,” declared one. “He just turned things
topsy-turvy and everything seemed to thrive. He had something new in salesmanship.” Hawkins moved quickly on a number of fronts.
⁴⁰

First, he began formulating accurate estimates of future sales, a procedure that helped Ford production managers to establish an effective schedule for turning out Model T's. He also systematized the entire business operation in terms of departmentalization, cost accounting, auditing of branch accounts, purchasing, stockpiling, and bookkeeping. The new sales manager formulated a plan to set up assembly plants outside of Detroit, a move that brought significant savings, because it was much cheaper to ship parts to a region for final assembly than several completed automobiles in a freight car. “A circle was drawn on the map around Detroit with the circumference on the points where freight rates began to affect the profits on sales, and in cities on the edge of this circle we established our assembly plants,” Hawkins explained. “By 1913 we had six to ten times as many branch houses and assembly plants as other companies had.”
⁴¹

Most important, however, Hawkins revitalized Ford's sales operation throughout the United States. One observer proclaimed him to be “perhaps the greatest salesman that the world ever knew … original in ideas, forcible in presenting them, a perfect dynamo for work, and a man who gets the quickest execution of any man I ever knew.” When starting out, Hawkins was asked where he would sell the first Model T: “I pointed to a grocery store on the opposite corner and said we could start there.” He soon unveiled a dynamic agenda of expansion by authorizing Ford field representatives to draw up exhaustive “territory reports” on every town in the United States with a population of over two thousand. These reports assessed road conditions, banking facilities, local economic conditions, and the financial state and personal habits of potential Ford dealers. Hawkins used this raw information to divide the country into a patchwork of sales zones, which he steadily filled with a network of seven thousand dealers by 1913. He regularly visited dealers throughout the country and urged them to ring doorbells and contact prospective buyers. He would ask a dealer to choose five likely purchasers. “Then I would say, ‘Let us, you and I, get in a car and see if we can't sell these five cars today or tomorrow and bring in some money for the fall season or the winter season.’ ”
⁴²

Hawkins' enthusiasm was matched by insights into the psychology of selling. He once explained how he would closely examine a dealer's salesroom for anything that might leave an unfavorable impression with a prospective buyer. Posters advertising tire chains were removed because they suggested the possibility of accidents; clear glass separating the salesroom from the repair garage was replaced with opaque, grilled glass so buyers would not see dilapidated cars being fixed; the stockroom was separated
from the sales area, so buyers would not overhear someone buy a new carburetor with the complaint, “Yours is the worst carburetor in the world.” “We didn't want anything around that might deter the buyer,” Hawkins reported. “Such a thing was called a negative selling point.”
⁴³

To help weld together the geographically scattered Ford sales force, Hawkins inaugurated
Ford Times,
as noted earlier, and filled it with items about automobile models, dealer activities, effective sales techniques, and buyer testimonials. It went out to dealers, branch managers, and prospective buyers. He personally guaranteed its focus on inspiration as well as information and instruction. A typical copy of
Ford Times
contained one of his essays exploring some aspect of salesmanship. Carrying titles such as “Can a Man Learn to Be a Salesman?,” “Hard Work First,” and “The Man Who Merely Fills the Position,” these pieces implored the Ford employee to demonstrate “the energy, ability, and determination to stretch his job into something bigger.”
⁴⁴

Hawkins' great success with the company made him a renowned figure, both in the Detroit community and in the automobile industry. His prowess as a salesman carried over into his private life, where he had a growing reputation as a fund-raiser for civic causes. In a long, laudatory article subtitled “A Modern Midas,” the Detroit
Times
praised his achievements in raising money for hospitals, the Board of Commerce, and numerous charities. “Norval Hawkins can lure money from sources whence it was never lured before,” the reporter noted, “and can make it do large and useful work after he has it.” Henry Ford and his company's board of directors also appreciated this smooth talker with the golden touch. On October 19,1909, they voted unanimously to award him, after not quite two years on the job, a princely bonus of $13,000 in appreciation for his efforts over the past year.
⁴⁵

Hawkins relied upon the singular appeal of the company's new automobile in igniting a sales revolution at Ford. The Model T, he believed, offered unprecedented advantages. For the salesman in the field, the Model T was easy to sell because “there was no conflict in the buyer's mind as to what to buy. There was only one thing to buy from a Ford dealer.” For the consumer, not only did the car offer many attractive qualities, such as vana-dium-steel components, but there was no fear that it would become obsolete or out of style. The Model T, Hawkins said repeatedly, was the special creation of Henry Ford, a courageous man with a “wonderful vision in the automotive industry,” whose determination and skill had brought this special car to life.
⁴⁶

But Hawkins' spectacular success in marketing the Model T also reflected his sensitivity to a larger, transforming cultural atmosphere. He displayed an instinctive sense of the new consumer world coming to life in
the early twentieth century. He understood that advertising played an important role in its operations. He demanded that Ford dealers put up signs in their communities showing the way to their establishments and encouraged them to display prominently the company's “winged pyramid” logo. He funneled publicity about Ford and the Model T to newspapers around the country. In
Ford Times,
Hawkins employed call-to-arms imagery in telling Ford dealers that advertising “is a most serious sort of business; it is arming the trade to do business in the largest possible measure; it is literally baptizing civilization with the name FORD, and the merits of Ford cars.”
⁴⁷

Hawkins' understanding of the ethos of modern consumption penetrated more deeply, however. Advertising brought consumers and goods together, but what really mattered, he concluded, was the nature of that connection. He explained the psychological substance of buying and selling in
The Selling Process: A Handbook of Salesmanship Principles
(1920), a book that he wrote after a decade of spectacular success with the Model T. The first two-thirds of the text drew upon Hawkins' long experience in sales to describe basic techniques for getting the attention and holding the interest of the potential buyer. These “preparatory” and “presentation” steps, as the author termed them, involved such things as the salesman's offering a friendly, confident, sincere persona; driving home the merits of his products through sensory appeals and mental images; and shaping positive, affirmative impressions of the product in the mind of the buyer.
⁴⁸

In the last third of
The Selling Process,
however, Hawkins turned to the heart of the matter: the “convincing steps” that clinched the purchase. Here lay the matter of “Persuading and Creating Desire,” as he termed it, and the shrewd salesman must realize that, ultimately, “the appeal must be made primarily to the heart instead of to the mind. A man's emotions, not his thoughts, control his Desires.” “You do not sell goods, but ideas about goods,” Hawkins insisted. Rational or utilitarian considerations carried but little weight in the act of buying, he explained, because people seldom reasoned their way into purchase. Instead, they usually sought to fill some kind of void in their emotional lives:

But how does the salesman create or enhance this emotional longing? Hawkins proposed various methods. He should use “suggestion” as a subtle psychological technique to prod the buyer's imagination of future fulfillment. He should “never sell disappointment” but make sure that his product can meet the desire that is aroused. He should cultivate faith in the buyer by making him believe that the salesman is really interested in his welfare. But all such efforts, Hawkins concluded, should converge on a primary goal: “to arouse vivid images of the satisfaction the prospect would derive from using the goods that will fill a lack he feels. That is, the salesman must start imagination to working toward Desire's fulfillment.”
⁵⁰

Clearly, Hawkins understood that, in America's emerging consumer culture, inspiring imagination, expressing emotion, and fulfilling desire drove the hunger for material goods. And he helped make the Model T one of the first great expressions of this new sensibility. Perhaps the best gauge of his achievement came from Charles Sorensen. This hard-nosed production manager was already on the path that would make him Henry Ford's right-hand man within a few years, and he did not bestow compliments lightly. Sorensen always believed, however, that Hawkins' efforts were at the center of the Model T's exploding popularity. In his words, Hawkins was “the greatest sales manager the company ever had and my hat is off to his natural-born genius in this line.” Sorensen sensed, perhaps more than anyone but Henry Ford himself, that Norval Hawkins had pushed the Model T to the cutting edge of a consumer revolution.
⁵¹

With the introduction of the Model T in the autumn of 1908, the Ford Motor Company leaped to the top of the automobile industry. In so doing, it also assumed a leading role in shaping America's new consumer economy and culture. As the company expanded dramatically, its guiding force, Henry Ford, demonstrated a keen awareness of his new car's cultural and social impact and the larger promises of happiness that it embodied. His devotion to the Model T and its consumer destiny was absolute and unwavering. In fact, Ford's faith in this automobile and its role quickly became the stuff of legend.

In 1912, for example, a few years after the release of the Model T, Ford returned to Detroit after an extended trip to Europe. While he was gone for
several months, the company's leading managers and engineers had conspired to present him with a pleasant surprise. During his absence, they designed a successor to the Model T, which featured a longer chassis, four-door body, windshield and top, and sleek, stylish lines. It was painted a rich red, and plans were drawn up for its production. The hand-built prototype was placed in an area between the business offices and the factory floor, and it became the subject of much admiring commentary for several days. Then Ford returned a day earlier than anticipated.

He strolled into the office area, glanced at some paperwork, and then noticed the gleaming red car sitting outside. His reaction, according to an eyewitness account from a company manager, was like a slow-gathering storm. After some small talk, he inquired about the unfamiliar vehicle and was told that it was the new Ford car. He was also informed that plans for production were well under way.