 identify the principal aims and objectives of a business and understand how they are used to assess its success, e.g. profitability, job creation, market share, growth and ethics

 What is the main objective of most businesses? For most businesses the most important objective is to make a profit in order to survive. If they don’t make a profit, or at least break even they will go bankrupt.

 Maximising profit – making the most possible profit by keeping costs as low as possible and revenue as high as possible  Maximising market share – having as large a share as possible of the market  Survival – in the current economic climate many businesses just want to survive, this is also true generally of new or small businesses  Breaking even – new businesses often just want to break even  Growth – many businesses start out small and then expand as a means of making more profit

 Providing the highest quality product  Providing a high level of customer satisfaction  Building a good reputation  Job creation  Limiting environmental damage

 Charities (not-for-profit) organisations just need to earn enough income to cover their costs  Organisations in the public sector (i.e. owned by the government, e.g. schools, hospitals)

 Some profit-seeking businesses exists to achieve social objectives e.g. Fair Trade or Jamie Oliver’s 15 restaurants. Their main aim is to use the profit they make to benefit society

 Answer the questions to do with Business Objectives

 be aware that there are a wide range of primary and secondary sources of data (CPG 19)  appreciate the need to collect accurate and relevant data which can be processed appropriately

 Primary data is collected first hand by a business (e.g. through questionnaires and surveys)  Secondary data is information that’s been collected by someone outside the business (e.g. market research reports, government publications, articles in newspapers or on the internet)

 Primary research is expensive and time- consuming  But it is directly relevant to the business  Secondary research is cheap and instantly available  But it may not be up to date or completely relevant

 What is the difference between primary and secondary data?