Marketing Environmental Factors
Companies get resources from the environment and supplies goods and services to the environment. There are different environmental factors that affect a business ability to serve its customers. These marketing environmental factors provide opportunities or threats to a particular business. Every company or organization tries to grasp the available opportunities and face the threats that emerge from the environmental forces. The term “business” actually applied to those economic activities whose primary purpose is to provide goods and services for society in an effective manner. Now there are two types of forces which affect an organization to serve its customers.
- Micro-Environment
- Macro-Environment
What is Macro Environment
In this post I would discuss the Macro environmental factors which consist of external forces. These external factors influence the company marketing strategy in a great length. The external environment forces are uncontrollable and company finds it hard to tackle with the external factors. The company should to be flexible to adopt the rapid changes in technology, government regulations, and competition in the external microenvironment. Both micro and macro environment plays vital role in marketing strategies of a company. So all successful companies take these environmental constraints into consideration while formulation, implementation and evaluation of marketing strategy.
Macro Environment Definition
All the external factors which are uncontrollable and influence the business strategies and decision making process.
How Macroenvironment Factors Affect Business Strategy
Macro-environment consists of demographic environment, economic environment, natural factors, technological factors, political factors and cultural factors. Let discuss each in detail how they affect business strategy.
- Demographic Environment
- Economic environment
- Natural Forces
- Technological Forces
- Political Forces
- Social & Cultural Forces
Demographic Factors
Demographic environment refers to studying human population in terms of size, density, location, age, gender, race and occupation. This is the very important factor that helps the marketer to divide the population into different market segments and target markets. Demographic data also helps in preparing geographical marketing plans, age and sex wise plans. Marketers divide the world population into three parts:
Baby Boomers: WWII-1960’s
Generation X: 1965-1975
Generation Y: 1977-1992 (some analyst consider it till now)
Economic Factors
Economic environment are those macro-economic factors that affects the consumer buying power and spending patterns. It includes level of income, policies and nature of an economy, economic resources, trade cycles, distribution of income and wealth. When the income of a family or country (per capita income) changes it also change the buying behavior and spending pattern of the family or country.
Natural Factors
Natural forces are related with natural resources that are vital as inputs by marketers or that are affected by marketing activities. Weather conditions and Global warming are the example of natural forces. So marketer should be are of several trends in the natural environment.
Technological Factors
Technological forces are most dramatic forces which are changing rapidly. These macro-economic forces create new markets and opportunities for marketers. For example a PC to Laptop and laptop to Palmtop is happen due to technological force which really change and business strategies and decision making process.
Political Factors
It includes Government actions, Government legislations, public policies and act which affect the operations of a company or business. These forces may affect an organization on local, regional, national or international level. So marketers and business management pay close attention to the political forces to judge how government actions which will affect their company.
Social & Cultural Factors
Cultural factors in heritage, living styles, religion etc. also affects a company marketing strategy. Social responsibility also become the part of marketing and slowly emerged in marketing literature. Socially responsible marketing is that business firms should take the lead in eliminating socially harmful products.
