Understanding industry, commerce and trade

Entrepreneurship is any endeavour undertaken for the purpose of creating value and making an impact. Business, on the other hand, is any endeavour undertaken for the purpose of commercializing value and making a profit. From indoors to industry, entrepreneurship is the bridge between a creative idea and a lucrative opportunity.

An industry is a group of manufacturers or businesses that produce a particular kind of goods or services. The automobile industry makes cars and car parts. The food service industry prepares food and delivers it to hotels, schools, and other big facilities. Workers in the textile industry design, fabricate and sell cloth. The tourist industry includes all the commercial aspects of tourism. Have you discovered the industry you belong? The entrepreneurial mindset offers you an opportunity to try out new things in your industry thereby creating value and making a difference.

The term business refers to an organization or enterprising entity engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities. The purpose of a business is to organize some sort of economic production of goods or services. Commerce is a subset of business that focuses on the distribution of goods. Generally, commerce can refer to an exchange of goods or services for money or something of equal value. From distribution of goods to transaction, commercial activities involve the sale of finished or unfinished products rather than their sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, or marketing.

Among other things, entrepreneurship involves turning raw materials into finished products. Entrepreneurship also involves moving from conceptualization to commercialization. An intellectual property for instance, can become a business opportunity and potentially, a commercial success if or when taken through a value chain—everything a business goes through to bring a good or service from conception to delivery and maintaining customer loyalty.

Value chain

When you fill up your gas tank at a service station, you are completing a process that started with an oil exploration company locating an oil deposit, continued with a drilling company extracting crude oil, and then went through many stages of transportation, refining, and distribution before it got to your gas tank. A number of people conducted business to get it there.

Commerce

Commerce refers specifically to the exchange of products or services between two or more parties. In the above example, you engaged in commerce when you paid to fill up your gas tank. Along the way, there were other examples of commercial activity. For example, the crude oil was sold in bulk to one or more oil companies. That was a commercial transaction as well.

Trade

The distinction between commerce and trade is pretty fine. Both are the direct exchange of goods and services for something of value between two parties. (In modern times, “something of value” means money.)

However, there are some differences in their usage:

• Commerce, as in the above example, implies a series of commercial transactions for the purpose of producing a product. The last stage of the commercial process is the sale of a finished product to its consumer.
• Trade suggests only the final transaction in which a seller provides a finished product and a consumer pays for it. In this sense, trade is a subset of commerce as commerce is a subset of business.

Going by the above explanations, you can obviously tell whether you are a trader or you are an entrepreneur. Remember, entrepreneurship is about value creation and a value chain is everything a business goes through to bring a good or service from conception to delivery. So, an entrepreneur is not a trader, the trademark of an entrepreneur is business value.

“Commercial success is like martial arts, you have to fight for it.” – thinkUP

Commercial success is a business’s ability to generate a profit using its resources.

Conceptual success is not the same thing as commercial success. Moving from conceptualization to commercialization or turning a creative idea into a lucrative opportunity is the height and hallmark of the creative economy. Unlike the agrarian economy which has its produce on “auto-demand” or the extractive economy which has a ready market for its products, the creative economy rests on the acceptability of ideas and concepts which are mostly packaged as inventions or innovations. Market opening and the commercial success of intellectual property rely on marketing efforts or campaigns, as well as the Willingness, Ability and Readiness (WAR) of potential consumers or customers.

Market

Market is the potential for a transaction to take place. At its core, marketing seeks to take a product or service, identify its ideal customers, and draw the customers’ attention to the product or service available. There is no market without marketing. What you don’t market cannot make it.

Marketing

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” — Official definition from the American Marketing Association, approved 2017.

The 4 P’s of Marketing

Product, price, place, and promotion are the Four Ps of marketing. The Four Ps collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service. Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s.

The ABCs of sales

ABC is an abbreviation for Always Be Closing. It’s a motivational mantra used by salespeople to stimulate aggressive sales. It means constantly looking for new leads, contacting, and trying to close them, at all costs, with all your efforts.

The ABC sales strategy demands the salesperson to be insistent and know when to switch to the next lead and avoid losses.

This tactic was popular in the 1980s-90s and is now considered outdated. However, it has left a large footprint on the sands of time. It has served as an inspiration for numerous sales books, movies and as a ground for reinventing sales, moving toward a more empathetic approach.

The economic and technological changes gave rise to a whole new philosophy of selling, also called modern ABCs of sales which are attunement, buoyancy and clarity.

Attunement refers to the ability to understand and empathize with the customer.

Buoyancy refers to the ability to stay afloat in the face of rejection and failure.

Clarity refers to the ability to communicate the value of the product or service in a way that is easy to understand.

Everything rises and falls on entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur adds value to industry, business, commerce and trade.

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