Part 2: Understanding the Marketplace and Consumer Value (Chapters 36)

3 Analyzing the Marketing Environment

Chapter Preview

So far, you’ve learned about the basic concepts of marketing and the steps in the marketing process for engaging and building profitable relationships with targeted consumers. Next, we’ll begin diggingdeeper into the first step of the marketing process—understanding the marketplace and customer needs and wants. In this chapter, you’llsee that marketing operates in a complex and changing environment. Other actors in this environment—suppliers, intermediaries, customers, competitors, publics, and others—may work with or against the company. Major environmental forces—demographic, economic, natural, technological, political, and cultural—shape marketing opportunities, pose threats, and affect the company’s ability to engage customers and build customer relationships. To develop effective marketing strategies, a company must first understand the environment in which marketing operates.

To start, let’s look at Kellogg, the world’s largest cereal maker and one of its most recognized and respected brands. Kellogg’s cereals have been staples in American homes for generations. However, as demographic, cultural, lifestyle, and other environmental shifts have changed how people eat breakfast, mighty Kellogg has had difficulty adapting. The storied company now finds itself battling to bring modern breakfast eaters back to its table.

Photo shows a few packets of Kellogg's products.

For generations, Kellogg’s storied cereal brands have helped to define the American breakfast experience. But as modern American lifestyles and breakfast-eating behaviors have changed, Kellogg has lost some of its snap, crackle, and pop.

Associated Press

Objectives Outline

  1. Objective 3-1 Describe the environmental forces that affect the company’s ability to serve its customers.

  2. Objective 3-2 Explain how changes in the demographic and economic environments affect marketing decisions.

  3. Objective 3-3 Identify the major trends in the firm’s natural and technological environments.

  4. Objective 3-4 Explain the key changes in the political and cultural environments.

  5. Objective 3-5 Discuss how companies can react to the marketing environment.

A company’s marketing environment consists of the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with target customers. Like Kellogg, companies must constantly watch and adapt to the changing environment—or, in many cases, lead those changes.

More than any other group in the company, marketers must be environmental trend trackers and opportunity seekers. Although every manager in an organization should watch the outside environment, marketers have two special aptitudes. They have disciplined methods—marketing research and marketing intelligence—for collecting information and developing insights about the marketing environment. They also spend more time in customer and competitor environments. By carefully studying the environment, marketers can adapt their strategies to meet new marketplace challenges and opportunities.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.12.149.174