Understanding the Marketing Environment and Its Impact

Chapter 3

1- Define The marketing environment? Includes the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with customers.

2- Define Micro environment?

A microenvironment consists of the actors close to the company that affect its ability to serve its customers, the company, suppliers, marketing intermediaries, customer markets, competitors, and publics.

1. The Company: In designing marketing plans, marketing management takes other company groups into account. These interrelated groups form the internal environment.
2. Suppliers: Are those firms and individuals that provide resources needed by the company and its competitors to produce goods and services. Suppliers provide the resources needed by the company to produce its goods and services. Marketing managers must watch supply availability—supply shortages or delays, labor strikes, and other events can cost sales in the short run and damage customer satisfaction in the long run. Marketing managers monitor the price trends of their key inputs.

- Treated as partners to provide customer value.

- Suppliers form an important link in the company’s overall customer value delivery system.

3. Marketing Intermediaries: Help the company to promote, sell, and distribute its products to final buyers. a- Resellers are distribution channel firms that help the company find customers and make sales. b- Physical distribution firms help the company to stock and move goods from points of origin to destinations. c- Marketing agencies are marketing research firms, advertising agencies, media firms, and marketing consulting firms that help the company target and promote its products to the right markets. d- Financial intermediaries help finance transactions or insure against risks associated with buying and selling of goods.

4. Competitors: Firms must gain strategic advantage by positioning their offerings against competitors’ offerings in the minds of consumers. No single competitive marketing strategy is best for all companies. The firm should consider its own size and industry position compared to those of its competitors.

5- Publics: Are any groups that have an actual or potential interest in or impact on an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives. They include: a- Financial publics: Influence the company’s ability to obtain funds. b- Media publics: Carry news, features, and opinion. c- Government publics: Regulate public safety, truth in advertising, and other matters. d- Citizen-action publics: Include consumer organizations, environmental groups, minority groups, and others. e- Local publics: Include neighborhood residents and community organizations. f- General public: May be concerned about the company’s products and activities. g- Internal publics: Include workers, managers, volunteers, and BOD.