MARKETING

Marketing Environment

Marketing environment
The overall marketing environment consists of The task environment includes the immediate actors involved in producing, distributing, and promoting the offering, including the company, suppliers, distributors, dealers, and the target customers. The broad environment consists of six components: demographic environment, economic environment, natural environment, technological environment, political-legal environment, and social-cultural environment. These environments contain forces that can have a major impact on the actors in the task environment, which is why smart marketers track environmental trends and changes closely.

The intra-firm environment

The marketing function often has to compete with other management functions to secure that share of the firms overall budget. Marketing needs a revenue budget to spend on advertising, exhibitions, direct mail, sales personnel, marketing research and other activities that form part of the process of winning orders. It also needs a capital budget in order to purchase equipment like computers.

Other management departments such as production, finance and human resource management feel that they too provide important services and hence deserve an equal share of the companys budget.
Hence, marketing department not only has to compete with other departments for financial resources, but it has to work in co-operation with these other functions. Marketing managers make decisions that directly affect other functional areas of the firm. Likewise, decisions made elsewhere within the organization affect marketings ability to carry out its job effectively.

The Macro-environment
The term macro-environment denotes all forces and agencies external to the marketing firm itself. Some of these forces and agencies will be closer to the operation of the firm than others, for example, a companys suppliers, agents, distributors and other distributive intermediaries and competing firms. These closer external factors are collectively referred to as the firms proximate macro-environment to distinguish them from the wider external forces found, for example, in the legal, cultural, economic and technological sub environments. These sub-environments can each have a significant effect upon the marketing firm.

Macro-environmental factor

The wider macro-environment

wider macro-environment may not be as immediate to the marketing firms day-to-day operations, but they are just as important. Factors making up these wider macro-environmental forces fall into four groups: 1. political (and legal) factors, 2. economic factors, 3. social (and cultural) factors, 4. technological factors.

A change in the supplier or competitive environment may, for example, have its basic cause in wider changes taking place in the technological or political arenas. The two parts of the overall macro-environment (the proximate and wider macroenvironments) are therefore closely related.

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