Financehome The Church, for example, may be said to be marketing a service, and it needs, possibly more urgently today than I ever before, to go out and sell itself. Or the Army which tries f to present a favourable public image with the object of in ' creasing recruitment. Or the nationalized industries, which j are in competition with private enterprise for both staff and I customers. In any case routine marketing techniques, such , as market research and analysis, are surely applicable to any ' form of enterprise involving the creation and delivery of I 'value satisfaction', whether material or spiritual. i But this is perhaps to take the business function outside the field under discussion. Basically the business of business I has to do with goods and services which meet material needs, 1 and any enterprise in which really aggressive marketing and inventiveness are only supernumerary activities can hardly [ be called a business. It is not surprising that this marketing function has, in Britain at least, taken so long to be understood as one of two i main business purposes. For decades in this country a stigma has somehow attached itself to selling. 'Look out for Joe, he'd sell you anything' or 'caveat emptor' were almost ' national slogans. Production and finance have long since • been highly respectable. Marketing is somehow ungentle manly. ; This is of course rapidly changing. The old story 'it's up to ; the sales department to sell what we make' is becoming i whiskered but, even so, it is no exaggeration that unless a business has within it a clear conception of marketing cus к tomer creation as the policy to be considered at the very start of the planning for the launching of a product or service, there will be no health in it. In Britain, although the situation is improving, those men and women with marketing vision, seeing it as the unique and central function of a business, are all too rare. And it is precisely because of the importance of the marketing job that has to be done that, at last, marketing is earning its proper place at the top of the management hierarchy. It is not enough, any longer, to tack marketing on to the end of the sales department; it has to span the entire business operation; it has to feed the researcher, the planner, the designer, the engineer, just as much as the salesman and the sales promoter. How can a customer be created if, from the word 'go', the needs of that customer (who after all is the market) are not in the forefront of the planning ? It follows that dynamic marketing is of little value in an economic vacuum. Business can only flourish when the economy is on the move, and therefore inventiveness or innovation must be regarded as the second basic business function. What is meant by these words? Broadly the answer is that the business of business, in addition to creating customers, must be to provide more efficient or better and more economic goods and services. to buy a house