The overall purpose of all administrative controls is, as in the case of production controls, the elimination of uncertainty and the exercise of constraint to achieve the desired result.* Since markets must remain the prime area of uncertainty, the effort of the corporation is therefore to reduce the autonomous character of the demand for its products and to increase its induced character. For this purpose, the marketing organization becomes second in size only to the production organization in manufacturing corporations, and other types of corporations come into existence whose entire purpose and activity is marketing.

These marketing organizations take as their responsibility what Veblen called “a quantity-production of customers.” His description of this task, while couched in his customarily sardonic language, is nevertheless a precise expression of the modern theory of marketing: “There is, of course, no actual fabrication of persons endowed with purchasing power ad hoc…; nor is there even any importation of an unused supply of such customers from abroad,—the law does not allow it.” Rather, as he points out, there is “a diversion of customers from one to another of the competing sellers.” But, from the point of view of each seller, this appears as “a production of new customers or the upkeep of customers already in use by the given concern. So that this acquisition and repair of customers may fairly be reckoned at a stated production-cost per unit; and this operation lends itself to quantity production.” Veblen goes on to point out that “the fabrication of customers can now be carried on as a routine operation, quite in the spirit of the mechanical industries and with much the same degree of assurance as regards the quality, rate and volume of output; the mechanical equipment as well as its complement of man-power employed in such production of customers being held to its work under the surveillance of technically trained persons who might fairly be called publicity engineers.”8