The Marketing Environment
1. The changing and uncertain marketing environment deeply affects the organization’. Discuss this statement, explaining what is meant by the’ marketing environment’ and explaining how it might affect marketing plans and activities with an example.
The marketing environment refers to all of the internal and external forces that affect a marketer’s ability to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings of value. The factors and forces within the marketing environment can be classified as belonging to the internal environment, the micro-environment, and the macro-environment.
The internal environment refers to the organization itself and the factors that are directly controllable by the organization. The micro-environment comprises the forces and factors at play inside the industry in which the marketer operates. Micro-environmental factors affect all parties in the industry, including suppliers, distributors, customers, and competitors. The macro-environment comprises the larger-scale forces that influence not only the industry in which the marketer operates but all industries. Macro-environmental factors include political forces, economic forces, sociocultural forces, technological forces, and legal forces.
This macro-environmental framework has been called the PESTEL framework. Micro-environmental and macro-environmental forces are outside of the organization and, while they can be influenced, they cannot be directly controlled. The internal environment refers to its parts, people, and processes. An organization is able to directly control the factors in its internal environment. A thorough understanding of the internal environment ensures that marketers understand the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, which positively and negatively affect the organization’s ability to compete in the marketplace.
The micro-environment consists of customers, clients, partners, competitors, and other parties that make up the organization’s industry. The organization cannot directly control its micro-environment and respond to the current and future needs and wants of their target market. They must understand how each of their partners’ processes works and how their partnerships benefit each party. They must also understand the risks involved in working with partners and the relative power balance between the organization and each partner.
Suppliers are a particularly crucial partner. Marketers must identify, assess, monitor, and manage risks to supplies and risks to the price of supplies. To succeed, marketers must ensure their offerings provide their target market with greater value than their competitors’ offerings. Thus, marketers seek to understand their competitors’ marketing mix, sales volumes, sales trends, market share, staffing, sales per employee, and employment trends. Marketers should analyze total budget competition, generic competition, product competition, and brand competition.
The macro-environment encompasses uncontrollable factors outside of the industry: political, economic, sociocultural, technological, and legal forces. Political forces describe the influence of politics on marketing decisions. Economic forces affect how much money people and organizations can spend and how they choose to spend it. Sociocultural forces affect people’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, preferences, customs, and lifestyles. Technological forces are those arising from the search for a better way to do things.
Technology changes the expectations and behaviors of customers and clients as well as how organizations work with their partners and within society. Laws and regulations are closely tied to politics and establish the rules under which organizations must conduct their activities. The most significant laws and regulations for marketers are related to privacy, fair trading, consumer safety, prices, contract terms, and intellectual property. Marketing metrics are used to measure current performance and the outcomes of past activities. A SWOT analysis is used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The example:
September 17, 2004, “European shoes” – the eastern town of Elche, Spain, China Shoes City, about 400 Spaniards gathered unidentified street, destroyed a bus carrying a Wenzhou shoe container truck and a Wenzhou shoe warehouse, causing about 800 million yuan of economic losses. This is the first-ever Spanish Chinese business interests of serious violations of the violence.
In fact, data show that since 2001, Wenzhou shoe incident overseas every year by resistance occurred, and there is an upward trend: August 2001 to January 2002, Russia had seized the incident occurred once, Wenzhou shoes involved.
The longest that the goods seized, the whole Zhejiang loss of about 3 billion yuan loss of individual enterprises million yuan or more. In the winter of 2003, more than 20 products of Wenzhou footwear shoe was burned in Rome, Italy, the specific loss is unknown. January 8, 2004, the Nigerian Government-issued “list of banned imports,” Wenzhou shoes one of them. February 12, 2004, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs sent a large number of police raids in Moscow, “Aimila” big market goods, Chinese businessmen, including China, Wenzhou shoe manufacturers, including business loss of about $ 30,000,000.
Relevant data and background information, Wenzhou shoe production for export as early as in 2001, jumped 40%, close to 30% of total output, only from Wenzhou Customs exit of shoes to the value of $ 460,000,000.
Wenzhou top 10 in several shoe factories to produce shoes for export-oriented, such as the “East Art”, “Tema”, etc. , including “Tema”, including several of Wenzhou shoe factory, and also Wal-Mart signed a production agreement for the global retail industry hegemony of mass production for supermarkets sell cheap shoes. From the product level, at present, most of China’s export of footwear is still the middle and low variety, low prices, generally 10 dollars to 30 dollars, many even less than 10 dollars. Took place in September this year, Spain’s “burning shoes” incident was burned average unit price of the shoes only 5 euros. Exports of high-end shoes and own-brand shares are very small and export more products to the OEM manner.
For example, most of the production of footwear sales in the U. S. low-end shoe store, while in the United States, the high-end shoe store also can procure the “Chinese shoes” of the shadow, but the price was lower than Italy, Spain, Brazil, and other countries products, and all Chinese-made shoes are not their own brands, trademarks and brands are using overseas.
Some of the same grade shoe prices in foreign markets and products to be lower than the country of origin, and some even lower than Vietnam, and Thailand’s exports. View from the export enterprises, private enterprises accounted for most; see from the export area, mainly in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, Fujian Jinjiang, Quanzhou, Guangdong, Shandong, Sichuan, and other regions, and has established a number of shoe manufacturing base; from the export scale, the current export value of 10 million U.
S. dollars more than 2,200 enterprises, accounting for nearly half of the total number of export enterprises. “The Spanish case, we need to think about the brand. We do not have a world-renowned brand, which is the international competition of Chinese shoes in the greatest difficulty. ” Executive vice president of Cornell said Zhou Jinmiao interview.
Members of Light Industry Import and Export Corporation Wenzhou Foreign Trade Wai seems to know China better than anyone in the international market brand shoes difficult. “Well-known supermarket chains in Europe BATA, there are a lot of shoes from around the world, but I never found more than 100 euros over Chinese shoes. Chinese shoe brands in the world, not only to low-end shoes to compete. Spain burning low-end shoes is the result of competition.
2. Describe in detail the five marketing management orientations. Discuss the marketer’s argument for why an organization should embrace the market orientation. Marketing Management Orientation The Marketing Orientation and the Marketing Concept. An organization with a market orientation focuses its efforts on 1)continuously collecting information about customers’ needs and competitors’ capabilities, 2) sharing this information across departments, and 3) using the information to create customer value.
The market orientation simply defines an organization that understands the importance of customer needs, makes an effort to provide products of high value to its customers, and markets its products and services in a coordinated holistic program across all departments. In what we call the “Marketing Concept,” the company embraces a philosophy that the “Customer is King. ” The Marketing Concept is an attitude. It’s a philosophy that is driven down throughout the organization from the very top of the management structure. The Marketing Concept communicates that “the customer is king. Everything that the company does focuses on the customer. Via the Marketing Concept, a company makes every effort to best understand the wants and needs of its target market and to create want-satisfying goods that best fulfill the needs of that target market and to do this better than the competition. It wasn’t always that way. There were other orientations that companies embraced over the years. The Production Concept has been around for years. That concept simply suggests that customers prefer inexpensive products that are readily available. In effect, “if we make it, they will come. The Product Concept suggests that companies that build the “better mousetrap” will gain favor. The thinking here is that customers want products that have higher quality, that offer better performance or do something unique. The Selling Concept proceeded with the Marketing Concept. From the 1920s until the 1950s, most firms had a sales orientation. The competition had grown, and there was a need to pursue the scarce customer. Sales could mean everything from salespeople to advertising to public relations, but little effort was made to coordinate any overall marketing function.
What we often saw in the Selling Concept was the “hard sell” and the belief that consumers wouldn’t purchase unless they were sold. The Holistic Marketing Concept that is embraced in the 21st-century results in companies looking at their overall marketing efforts. This includes how their marketing affects society, as a whole. Marketing is also done internally within the company. Without customers, a company will quickly flounder — thus the importance of the relationship. Holistic marketing looks at the connectivity of the company, its people, its customers, and the society in which it operates.
The Societal Marketing Concept focuses on. Market positioning in the 70s of last century by the American Marketing experts Iris and Jack Trout’s, its meaning is an enterprise based on existing products on the market competitors, the location of the products for a customer These characteristics or attributes of the emphasis, create unique products for the enterprise, giving the impression of a distinctive image, and to pass such a vivid image to the customer, so that the products in the market to determine the appropriate location. Market positioning of a product itself is not what you do, but you do the eyes of potential consumers.
The essence of market orientation to the enterprise and other enterprises strictly separated, so that customers clearly feel and recognize the difference, which the customer occupies a special place in mind. Another argument is the product positioning, target market positioning, competitive positioning. Market positioning is the key enterprises should try to find their products more competitive than the competition’s features. Competitive advantage is generally two basic types: one is price competitive, that is, under the same conditions set lower prices than the competition. This requires companies to take all efforts to reduce unit costs.
Second, competitive preference, which can provide certain features to meet customer-specific preferences. This requires companies to take every effort to work on product features. Therefore, the whole process of the enterprise market positioning can be accomplished through three steps: 1) Analysis of the status of the target market to confirm the potential of this business a competitive advantage 2) The exact choice of competitive advantage, the initial positioning of the target market Competitive advantage that the ability of companies to outperform its competitors.
This capability can be either existing, may also be potential. Select a competitive advantage is actually a business and competitor strength compared to all aspects of the process. Indicators should be a relatively complete system, the only way to accurately select the relative competitive advantage. The usual method is to analyze, compare companies and competitors in business management, technology development, procurement, production, marketing, finance, and what kinds of products is the strength of seven areas, which are weak.
To select the most suitable for the business advantages of the project, initially set to target the enterprise market position. 3) Shows a distinct competitive advantage and re-positioning The main task of this step is the enterprise through a series of publicity and promotion activities, the competitive advantage of its unique and accurate communication to potential customers and impress in the minds of customers. To this end, companies should first understand the target customer, know, know, identity, love, and preference of the company’s market position, established in the minds of customers is consistent with the positioning of the image.
Second, companies target customers through a variety of efforts to strengthen the image and maintain an understanding of target customers, target customers’ attitude stability and deepening the feelings of the target customers to consolidate in line with the market’s image. Finally, enterprises should pay attention to the target customers understand their market position or because of deviations propaganda enterprise market positioning errors caused by target customers fuzzy, chaos, and misunderstanding, and promptly correct the inconsistencies in the image and market positioning.
Company’s products in the market positioning even if it is appropriate, but in the following circumstances, should consider re-positioning:
(1) Introduction of new competitors, product positioning in the vicinity of the enterprise products, enterprise products occupied part of the market, so that the decline in market share of enterprise products.
(2) Consumer needs or preferences change so that the enterprise product sales plummeted. To avoid the strong positioning strategy: trying to avoid is the most powerful business or other enterprises directly place a strong competition, while positioning their products in another market area, to make their products with certain characteristics or attributes the strongest or strong opponents are more significant differences.
Head-positioning strategy: is an enterprise based on its own strength, to occupy a better market position, at the market on the dominant, most powerful, or compete, head-strong competitors, leaving their own and rival products into the same market position. Looking for new but not yet occupied the position of the potential market demand to fill vacancies on the market, production market, not, with some characteristics of products. Such as Japan’s Sony Corporation Sony Walkman and a number of new
