Understanding the Marketing Environment: Macro and Micro Factors

Posted on Dec 15, 2024 in Other subjects

Marketing Environment

The marketing environment of an organization:

“The set of direct and indirect forces, both controllable and uncontrollable, that are susceptible to influence from a micro and macro level, in all its actions, decisions, and results.”

External Marketing Analysis

  • Uncontrollable factors in the organization (macro environment).
  • Factors with some possible control (micro environment).
  • Identify opportunities and threats.

Internal Analysis

  • Organizational factors (micro environment).
  • Identifies strengths and weaknesses.

1. Macro Environment of Marketing

The company and its suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, and the public interact in a broad macro environment consisting of forces that pose opportunities and threats for the company. Within the macro environment, there are six major forces:

  • Forces that determine the performance of the company.
  • The power company’s influence is limited.

Objectives of the analysis:

  • Profitable opportunities
  • Minimize threats

Analysis Conditions:

  • Demographic
  • Economic
  • Technological
  • Sociocultural
  • Competitive
  • Political and Legal
  • Ecological and Natural

A. Demographic Conditions

Conditions relating to the population:

  • Birth rate.
  • Immigration.
  • Life expectancy.
  • New family forms.

B. Economic Conditions

Most important economic indicators:

  • GDP growth, unemployment rate, inflation, public spending, interest rates (saving, spending, investment).
  • Globalization:
  • More competitive market.
  • Important role in exports.

C. Technological Conditions

Possibilities for innovation:

  • On Sale
  • In marketing

Innovation is a key factor in competitiveness

  • Determine the marketing-mix variables
  • Development Technologies
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

D. Cultural Conditions

Standards, attitudes, and habits common in the social environment that influence individual, family, and organizational behavior.

Trends:

  • Dynamic and changing family unit.
  • Working women outside the home.
  • Professional life with more changes and longer holidays.
  • Media Technology: telework, distance learning, …
  • Sociological changes.
  • Consumer behavior with more customized products.

E. Political and Legal Conditions

  • Institutional, legal, and public.
  • Harmonized regulatory framework in the EU
  • Legal framework: limiting the action to enter the market. Some examples:
  • Self-control standards.

F. Ecological and Natural Conditions

  • Factor of ecological and socio-economic change
  • Ecological consumption: environmental and consumerist movements
  • Demand for products less harmful to the environment: Green Marketing

Strategies:

  • Exclusive focus on marketing to the environment.
  • Effort at all levels in the environment.

2. Micro Marketing Environment

Consists of the forces close to the company that affect its ability to satisfy customers, i.e., the business, consumer markets, marketing channels it uses, competitors, and the public.

Forces that influence directly and immediately:

  • The management of the company.
  • The terms of trade.
  • Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the organization

Micro Environment:

  • Internal: organization and structure.
  • External: suppliers, intermediaries, public purpose and interest groups, competition.

A. Micro Internal Environment

  • Organization: Human and material resources available to an end.
  • Organizational Structure: Formal pattern of relationships, communication, decision processes, procedures, and systems.
  • External expression of the organization:
    • Organization chart, job descriptions, and procedures.
      • Marketing Department’s position.
      • Internal Marketing.

B. Micro External Environment

A. Suppliers

  • Home Channel: the origin of products marketed
  • Conditions the company’s offer
  • Relationships: can be transformed into a competitive advantage
  • The need for a climate of cooperation.
  • Relationship Marketing.

B. Intermediaries

  • They link production and delivery with use or consumption.
  • Spatial and temporal distance between production and consumption.
  • Matching supply to demand
  • Distribution Process: transport, split supply, storage,
  • Connect, communicate.
  • Simplify exchanges.
  • Participate in marketing activities
  • Against risks in the business name
  • Generate satisfaction
  • Conflicting interests.

C. Target Audience and Interest Groups

Clients:

  • Base Marketing actions and decisions
  • Identification and understanding of consumer needs, consumer behavior

Interest Groups:

  • Shareholders, media, associations, …
  • They can influence the performance of the company
  • Shares of Communication (Public Relations)

D. Competition

  • Rivalry between organizations.
  • Macro environmental factors determine expandability.
  • Based on products in the same category or in other categories to the same or other needs.