ADVERTISING: Yes, We Have No Bonanza

To pep up his women’s shoe business last summer, Thomas Callahan had his son design some new flat-heeled models. Callahan, who leases the “debutante” shoe department in Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller, Inc., got Philadelphia’s Cellini Shoes, Inc. to make the shoes, plugged them in the Sunday New York Times. In two weeks, mail orders came in from every state in the union—except Montana. Mystified, Callahan ran the same ad in the New York Herald Tribune. Again the orders poured in; still no sales in Montana, which calls itself the “Bonanza State.”

In another Times ad, Callahan asked plaintively: “What’s the matter with Montana? . . . Don’t they like flats in Montana? . . . Aren’t legs a national tradition? Montana, Montana, please write.” Wrote one embittered Missoula man: “I don’t think our women need these flats. Their feet are flat enough . . . Most of them go barefooted out here . . .”

With no help from Montana, Callahan sold 9,000 pairs of flats in two months, as his total shoe business soared 36% above the same period in 1948. Then the Times got to worrying about Montana. It ran Callahan’s “What’s the matter with Montana?” ad again, in its own pages and in Women’s Wear Daily, and added a note: there was nothing the matter with Montana, because “Montanans buy 1,111 copies of the New York Times.”

Callahan finally had an answer to his question, in proud local ads by stores in Billings, Helena and Lewiston. Example, in the Billings Gazette: “There is nothing the matter with Montana . . . Montanans merely buy their ‘flat-heeled pretties’ at the Hart-Albin Co.”