Someone once observed, “There are three kinds of companies: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what’s happened.” Many companies view the marketing environment as an uncontrollable element to which they must react and adapt. They passively accept the marketing environment and do not try to change it. They analyze environmental forces and design strategies that will help the company avoid the threats and take advantage of the opportunities the environment provides.

Other companies take a proactive stance toward the marketing environment. Rather than assuming that strategic options are bounded by the current environment, these firms develop strategies to change the environment. Companies and their products often create and shape new industries and their structures, products such as Ford’s Model T car, Apple’s iPod and iPhone, Google’s search engine, and Amazon’s online marketplace.

Even more, rather than simply watching and reacting to environmental events, proactive firms take aggressive actions to affect the publics and forces in their marketing environment. Such companies hire lobbyists to influence legislation affecting their industries and stage media events to gain favorable press coverage. They take to the social media and run blogs to shape public opinion. They press lawsuits and file complaints with regulators to keep competitors in line, and they form contractual agreements to better control their distribution channels.

By taking action, companies can often overcome seemingly uncontrollable environmental events. For example, whereas some companies try to hush up negative talk about their products, others proactively counter false information. McDonald’s did this when a photo went viral showing unappetizing “mechanically separated chicken” (also known as “pink goop”) and associating it with the company’s Chicken McNuggets:52

McDonald’s quickly issued statements disclaiming the pink goop photo as a hoax and noting that McNuggets are made using only boneless white breast meat chicken in a process that never produces anything remotely resembling the weird pink substance. But McDonald’s took its response an important step further. It created its own nearly three-minute social media video giving a tour of a company processing plant in Canada, showing the step-by-step process by which McNuggets are made. In the process, fresh chicken breasts are ground and seasoned, stamped into four nugget shapes (balls, bells, boots, and bow ties), battered, flash-fried, frozen, packaged, and shipped out to local McDonald’s restaurants where they are fully cooked. There’s not a trace of the gross pink goop anywhere in the process. The proactive video itself went viral, garnering more than 3.5 million YouTube views in less than six weeks. As a follow-up, McDonald’s launched an “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign inviting consumers to submit questions about its food-making processes via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media. It then addressed the top concerns in a series of “behind-the-scenes” webisodes.

Marketing management cannot always control environmental forces. In many cases, it must settle for simply watching and reacting to the environment. For example, a company would have little success trying to influence geographic population shifts, the economic environment, or major cultural values. But whenever possible, smart marketing managers take a proactive rather than reactive approach to the marketing environment (see Real Marketing 3.2).