Relating To The Public How Walter Reed Did It For Vending Operators

I joined VT after three years in the Army, and with a degree in English. These attributes qualified us to be an editor, but someone had to explain what an "editor" does, other than write intelligibly. We were fortunate in joining a publication run by hands-on people who knew how the parts of the task fitted together, and an industry that has proven endlessly interesting.

This reminiscence was inspired by the recent death of Walter W. Reed, who served as public relations director for the National Automatic Merchandising Association from 1958 to 1989 -- a span of time that extended from the earliest days of the single-cup fresh-brew coffee machine to the microprocessor-controlled whole-bean hot beverage vender. The full-line vending industry was very new in 1958, and its youthful boom years started at about that time and extended through the next decade.

One profound strategic challenge that the early full-line industry confronted was that few people knew (or even thought about) who placed, filled and serviced those machines. It was often said, bitterly, that some alderman would walk past a vending machine in the city hall and notice a route driver removing a bag of money -- and any politician, seeing something like that, reflexively asks: "Where's mine?" This led to all sorts of license and fee schemes, and those in turn led operators to organize in their own defense. NAMA played a leading role in this struggle, developing its affiliated state councils program to facilitate concerted local action and assembling a very effective legal staff.

It was obvious, too, that a sympathetic citizenry is a very good defense against inequitable levies. The industry's government relations experts could inform legislators about the costs of acquiring that machine, installing it in city hall, buying the truck, hiring the driver, and so on; but it would be even better if other, non-vending constituents would object to a proposed unjust tax because it would be unfair.

It was once said by an ARA executive, in a public forum in the late '60s, that "our challenge as an industry is to persuade everyone that there's nothing about a vending machine that enables us to sell anything through it for a nickel less." This pointed to the need for vending companies to become more visible to, and more highly regarded by, their communities.

And this is where Walter Reed came in. He worked tirelessly and meticulously to assist operators in building rapport with local news media, and in conducting their businesses in a way that communicated professionalism and cleanliness to everyone who saw a route truck, or who drove past the company headquarters.

He also reacted swiftly, with controlled wrath to supposedly humorous newspaper columns bewailing the frustrations inflicted by vending machines on the long-suffering public. His Letters to the Editor in response to those slurs were classics.

He also consistently urged operators to do everything in their power to minimize those frustrations: to be sure that patrons knew how to contact the operator to report a malfunction or request a refund, and to use coin mechanisms that held the payment in escrow until the vend was complete. If consumers did not know what it was like to be a vending operator, so too, vending operators did not always know what it was like to be a vending patron. Public relations requires a degree of empathy for the public to whom one wishes to relate.

And he was a journalist by training and experience, which meant that his press releases got all the "who, what, when, where" right, provided details when details were indicated, and were always timely. While this approach to public relations is not extinct, it has been supplanted in much of the corporate world by "marketing communications," which minimizes the difference between publicity and advertising. We suspect that this has something to do with the fruitless desire to derive "metrics" for the determination of the exact return on investment in public relations. We think that is a bootless errand, and simply impairs the credibility of those who succumb to it.

Vending today is a mainstream retailing industry, which is attributable to remarkable advances in the ability to vend packages of varying sizes and shapes, and dramatic advances in technology. These have given us customer-friendly features that would have been regarded as fantasy in 1958, from positive vend assurance through remote machine monitoring to intelligent graphic user interfaces. That operators today look favorably on these improvements is, we think, a tribute to NAMA's long, consistent emphasis on customer focus. And much of that emphasis was imparted by Walter Reed.

Reed had overcome extreme adversity in his adolescence in Germany, and like many of our industry's pioneers, had served in World War II. He never spoke of this to us, though he devoted much of his retirement to telling the story in a well-received book, The Children of La Hille (Syracuse University Press, 2015). This country, and our industry, welcomed him, and he repaid that welcome with single-minded devotion.

SEE ALSO: Walter Reed, Longtime NAMA Public Relations Head, Dies At 91.