Businesses aim to profit by producing and distributing goods and services to meet consumer wants and needs. They use marketing research to identify potential customers and organize resources like employees, buildings, and raw materials to efficiently manage production. All businesses work to identify consumer values, produce goods and services to fulfill changing wants and needs, and engage in organizing, managing, producing, and marketing activities to make products available for purchase.

1. BUSINESS IN
TODAY’S WORLD
INTRODUCTIONTO BUSINESS
Chapter 1

2. Learning Objectives
• Explain the difference between wants and needs
• Discuss what businesses do to provide goods and services
• Describe some steps in planning for a career
• Identify some jobs and skills in business and financial operations
• Explain the steps in decision making

3. Business terms
• wants
• needs
• goods
• services
• resource
• opportunity cost
• business
• ability
• aptitude
• career clusters

4. Business
• Business is all of the activities of an individual or group of individuals involved in
producing and distributing goods and services to customers.
• Businesses aim to profit from the goods and services they provide.
• Every time you buy a good or service, you are participating in deciding what a
business will produce.
• When people don’t buy a certain good or service, it indicates that the good or
service is not wanted, and businesses will stop producing it.

5. Business
• Businesses try to identify your values and goals, and cater for them.
• A manufacturer of running shoes is interested in your values and goals as a runner,
and will try to make a product that appeals to you.
• How do businesses identify potential buyers?

6. Marketing Research
• Marketing research is one of the tools businesses use to identify potential
customers.
• Businesses must also consider the resources they will use to produce goods and
services – they must use these resources efficiently.

7. Providing Goods and Services
• Businesses provide goods and services based on what people need and want.
• People usually have different needs and wants, and these needs and wants change
over time.
• New businesses often come into being because of these changing wants and
needs.
• Can you name a product that became available because of people’s changing wants
and needs?

8. Providing Goods and Services
• The development in information technology – computers, software,
telecommunications – has created a rapid production of a variety of goods and
services.
• You depend on a specific program to complete schoolwork: Edmodo.
• People working at home, school, or other workplaces constantly rely on
information technology to complete their jobs. Banks rely on computers and
software to update customers’ financial information

9. What Business Does
• When a product is available for you to purchase, many business activities have
taken place so that you could buy it:
• A company organized the people and machinery to provide the product.
• Within the company, people managed the company’s human, financial, and
production resources and produced the good.
• Then, the company marketed the product by advertising it and selling it to stores
near you.
• Every business uses this combination of organizing, managing, producing, and
marketing its goods and services to consumers.

10. Resources Businesses Use
• To produce goods and services, a business needs resources.
• Are employees resources? Are buildings resources? Is energy a resource?
• Raw materials used to produce a good are resources. However, the person who
came up with the idea of the good is also a less obvious, but much more valuable,
resource.
• Balancing the use of resources is what companies aim to do on a daily basis: they
decide whether it costs too much to use on resource over another.

11. End of Section 3

12. Quiz Check
• Explain the term business.
• What activities must all businesses engage in when providing goods or services to
consumers.