With the social factor, a business can analyze the socio-economic environment of its market via elements like customer demographics, cultural limitations, lifestyle attitude, and education. With these, a business can understand how consumer needs are shaped and what brings them to the market for a purchase. This has to do with the beliefs and culture of the society you are operating in. Population trends, dietary considerations, ethics and media, and spend habits are some of the factors that come under social considerations that you need to observe in your business activity.
For example, if you do not take social factors into account, you can lose sales, face legal issues, and worse still, offend your customers. A case in point is Pepsi. When the global brand opened shop in China, they used the Slogan ‘Pepsi brings you back to life’ which actually translated to ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave’. These various social issues have to be taken into account.
The Social factor focuses its attention on forces within society such as family, friends, colleagues, neighbors and media. Our attitudes, interests, and the opinions shape who are we as people and ultimately the buying behavior towards the product.
In short social factors are all about: social lifestyle trends demographics consumer attitudes and opinions media views law changes affecting social factors brand, company, technology image consumer buying patterns fashion and role models major events and influences buying access and trends ethnic/religious factors advertising and publicity ethical issues