Marketing Analysis
3 4 5 6 7 8 The marketing environment Understanding consumer behaviour Understanding organizational buying behaviour Understanding marketing ethics and corporate social responsibility Marketing research and information systems Market segmentation and positioning 72 108 145 180 216 259
CHAPTER
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Change is the only constant.
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A. TOFFLER
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The marketing environment
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to: describe the nature of the marketing environment explain the distinction between the microenvironment and the macroenvironment discuss the impact of political and legal, economic, ecological/physical environmental, social/cultural and technological forces on marketing decisions explain how to conduct environmental scanning discuss how companies respond to environmental change
Political and Legal Forces
The marketing environment
FIGURE
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marketing-orientated firm looks outwards to the environment in which it operates, adapting to take advantage of emerging opportunities and to minimize Macroenvironment potential threats. In this chapter, we will examine the marketing environment and how to monitor it. In particular we will Microenvironment look at some of the major forces acting on companies in their macro- and Economic Political / legal microenvironments. Suppliers Customers The marketing environment consists of the actors and forces that affect a company’s Company capability to operate effectively in providing products and services to its customers. As we saw in Chapter 2 it is useful to classify Distributors Competitors these forces into the macroenvironment Social/ Ecological / and the microenvironment (see Fig. 3.1). cultural physical The macroenvironment consists of a number of broad forces that affect not only the company but also the other actors in the microenvironment. Traditionally Technological four forces—political/legal, economic,