homemoney to purchasehow It would be well to analyse the question of customer creating a little more thoroughly, because it must be admitted that in Britain this has been belatedly recognized as a business purpose. Markets do not happen by chance. They are the result of the business action which anticipates a need. This is not to say that the want that is satisfied may not have been already felt; but until someone has the enterprise to meet it the desire is often unexpressed and vague. Equally, it can be that a business action starts from scratch and creates a want; in Britain who would have dreamed a few years ago that coffee shops, now glorified with the name of Espresso Bars, would have come back to such proliferation as they enjoyed in their heyday in the eighteenth century? A topical example of the question of both satisfying a hitherto dimly felt but unsatisfied want as well as creating a want is the supply of consumer goods to the socalled undeveloped countries. It is a fascinating exercise to probe a little into, say, the wants of cashcrop cultivators small, independent growers of coffee and cotton, for example in an African community. Here are men and women who, because of the growth of world demand for cotton and coffee under normal conditions, are no longer victims of a near subsistence economy. They have money to spend; but it is business enterprise whether it is local effort or the imaginative energy of men thousands of miles away in London, Manchester, or New York that can alone turn that money into what the definition under discussion calls 'value satisfaction'. And, parenthetically, it must be added that precious opportunities in these fields of business are being lost by Britain. Coffee bars for British teenagers and motorcars or radios for African farmers are only small signals pointing to a far larger question. Businesses can only survive if those responsible for them realize that what they think they produce whether goods or services is of less importance than what the consumer thinks he or she is consuming. The prosperity of a business depends on the sense of 'value satisfaction' enjoyed by the customer. A vivid example of this is demonstrated in a case history at the end of this book on the subject of Lyons Comer Houses. A section in a later chapter will consider the detailed management of marketing and how, synthesized with production and finance, it completes the business 'trimty' the three chief means by which management achieves its objectives. In the present context marketing has a far wider meaning. If the business of business is to create a customer, then marketing and inventiveness ('innovation' as some American writers call it) distinguish business from other forms of human undertaking. When goods or services are produced, distributed, and sold, a business comes into being. It could be argued here that there are other activities, never before considered in the same breath as 'business', that are becoming dependent on this wider concept of marketing for their success. Financehome