Skip to main content

40. Marketing Environment

 The marketing environment consists of the task environment and the broad environment. The task environment includes the actors engaged in producing, distributing, and promoting the offering. These are the company, suppliers, distributors, dealers, and target customers. 

In the supplier group are material suppliers and service suppliers, such as marketing research agencies, advertising agencies, banking and insurance companies, transportation companies, and telecommunications companies. 

Distributors and dealers include agents, brokers, manufacturer representatives, and others who facilitate finding and selling to customers.

The broad environment consists of six components: demographic environment, economic environment, social- cultural environment, natural environment, technological environment, and political-legal 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.

Marketers must pay close attention to the trends and developments in these and adjust their marketing strategies as needed. New opportunities are constantly emerging that await the right marketing savvy and ingenuity. Consider Pinterest.

Pinterest: One of the fastest-growing social media sites ever–its surpassed 10 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in January 2012 and doubled that just four months later–Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that lets users collect and share images of projects or products on digital scrapbooks or “pinboards.” Especially popular with women planning weddings, saving recipes, and designing kitchen upgrades, Pinterest has driven more traffic to websites in a month than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. Part of its appeal is its unique customizable grid of images. Pinterest’s sweet spot is that users are often in a shopping mindset; one study showed almost 70% of online purchasers who found a product via Pinterest went on to buy, compared to 40% for Facebook. Brands from Dell and Mercedes-Benz to Peanut Butter & Co. and Zombie SAK are integrating the site into their social media strategies. Nevertheless, Pinterest is still exploring how to best monetize its business venture.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

19. What is a Market?

 Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (such as the housing market or the grain market). Five basic markets and their connecting flows are shown in below. Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services, and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers. Consumers sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services. The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer, and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services.     Each nation’s economy, and the global economy, consists of interacting sets of markets linked through exchange processes. Marketers view sellers as the industry and...
Post a Comment
Read more

22. Business markets

 Companies selling business goods and services often face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive offerings. Advertising and Web sites can play a role, but the sales force, the price, and the seller’s reputation may play a greater one.   The term business, business-to-business or industrial marketing focuses on understanding business buying centres and on how businesses purchase in different ways to consumers – further explored in Chapter 8. Business markets are now networked organizations operating in a complex environment. Nowadays the focus is on neither consumer or business markets but on recognizing that the lines between the two are blurring in four important ways: A blurring of value chains through outsourcing and other relationships that allows networks of companies and customers to operate. When Apple set up its iTunes online music store, it brought together recording companies with music and customers who wanted to download music tracks f...
Post a Comment
Read more

17. Marketing’s role in creating demand

 Marketers must have a variety of skills, one in particular being the ability to stimulate demand for their company’s services and products. However, this is too limited a view of the tasks that marketers perform and the skills that they must have. Just as production and logistics professionals are responsible for supply management, marketers are responsible for demand management along with their other roles. Marketing managers seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organizations objectives. Eight states of market demand are possible:   Full demand: Consumers buy all services or products brought to market. Overfull demand: There are more consumers demanding the service or product than can be satisfied. Irregular demand: Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis.  Declining demand: Consumers begin to buy the service or product less frequently or not at all. Negative demand: Consumers dislike the s...
Post a Comment
Read more