Fast Reading 1. There is hardly anything you do that does not put you in touch with marketing or influence marketing activities. You take part in marketing when you get a haircut, ride a bus, or cash a check. You influence marketing when you phone a friend, buy a record, or order a hamburger. 2. When you go to one of the stores in your community to buy something — a T-shit, a ball pen,film for your camera, or a magazine — you have taken the last step in a vast and complicated process. Business has done a great deal of planning and spent huge sums of money to get you to take that step. When you take it, you become a customer. You also become a consumer. 3. A customer is anyone who buys or rents goods or services. Often the customer and the consumer — the person who uses the goods or services — are the same. If you purchased the pencils and paper you are using, you are both customer and consumer. Sometimes, however, the customer and the consumer are separate persons. When parents buy baby food and infants’ clothing, they are the customers, and their children are the consumers. Customers and consumers may be individuals, like the parents and their children, or institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and governments. They may even be other businesses. 4. Both the customer and the consumer are important in marketing, and indeed, marketing people often use the two words to mean the same thing. Business has both customer and consumer in mind from the time a product is designed to the time it is sold. For example, a great deal of breakfast cereal advertising is directed to children. Although most food buying is done by adults, their purchases are strongly influenced by children’s preferences. Those children who express a preference for one food over another are influential consumers. They are an example of why business must take into account what consumers as well as customers want. (328 words, 3 ́20")