Western Europe: Making the Market

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"Whether Britain joins the Common Market or not," predicted one British businessman last week, "there will soon be no more difference between the English and the French than there is between the English and the Scots." Bringing that day ever closer is a new class of European business leaders, who, with aggressiveness and vision, are shaping a new Europe, where national tastes and economic expectations are increasingly giving way to a single European pattern. They have made Mercedes the new status symbol in Italy, cheap Italian refrigerators the rage among French housewives, and Dutch TV sets a hot seller in West Germany.

Readymade Profit. The roster of top European executives today reflects profound changes in Europe's business community. Before World War II, most big European companies were owned and run by clannish, long-established families that kept their business affairs strictly secret, regarded advertising as an unnecessary extravagance and shunned public attention. The goal was high profit on low volume, and membership in a tidy cartel generally eliminated the danger of painful competition over prices and markets. A rigid class system kept workers from rising into executive ranks; the notion of increasing national buying power by raising wages was regarded as radical nonsense.

But war and rough-and-tumble reconstruction made way for new men and new ideas. Wily Dino de Laurentiis, who has revitalized Italy's film industry by making movies (War and Peace, Attila) with international casts and the specific purpose of tapping international markets, is the son of a small Neapolitan pasta manufacturer. In Britain, neither George Harriman, who as head of British Motor Corp. is the United Kingdom's biggest automaker, nor Financier Charles Clore, who has won fame as London's "Takeover King," can boast the once-traditional public school and university background.

The rise of the new men has not yet wiped out the European conviction that a company's profit figures are to be guarded like nuclear secrets. But to a growing degree, European executives are recognizing that public opinion does affect their business. Though his predecessor as chairman of Belgium's Société Générale was so aloof that he Defused even to release his photo for publication, new Chairman Max Nokin freely allows both pictures and interviews in an effort to counter charges that his firm is meddling in Congolese politics. More important, with European workers now earning better wages, their employers are finding that their best market is at home, increasingly aim for greater volume at lower markups and strive to meet mass tastes. Onetime racing driver Count Giannino Marzotto, managing director of Italy's biggest textile firm, daringly steered his family-owned company into ready-to-wear clothes despite warnings that he was bound to fail, has succeeded so grandly that he now oversees a thriving chain of 20 inexpensive-clothing stores throughout Italy.