The Company’s Microenvironment

BUS104-101

Week 3

CHAPTER 3

THE MARKETING ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction

A company’s marketing environment consists of the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to develop and maintain successful relationships with its target customers.

1). Being successful means being able to adapt the marketing mix to trends and developments in this environment.

2). Changes in the marketing environment are often quick and unpredictable.

3). The marketing environment offers both opportunities and threats.

4). The company must use its marketing research and marketing intelligence systems to monitor the changing environment.

5). Systematic environmental scanning helps marketers to revise and adapt marketing strategies to meet new challenges and opportunities in the marketplace.

6). The marketing environment is made up of a microenvironmental and a macroenvironment.

The Company’s Microenvironment

The company’s microenvironment consists of six actors that affect its ability to serve its customers. These actors combine to make up the company’s value delivery system. These actors are:

The Company

The first actor is the company itself and the role it plays in the microenvironment.

1). Top management is responsible for setting the company’s mission, objectives, broad strategies, and policies.

2). Marketing managers must make decisions within the parameters established by top management.

3). Marketing managers must also work closely with other company departments. Areas such as finance, R & D, purchasing, manufacturing, and accounting all produce better results when aligned by common objectives and goals.

4). All departments must “think consumer” if the firm is to be successful.

Suppliers

Suppliers are firms and individuals that provide the resources needed by the company and its competitors to produce goods and services. They are an important link in the company’s overall customer “value delivery system.”

1). One consideration is to watch supply availability (such as supply shortages).

2). Another point of concern is the monitoring of price trends of key inputs.

Marketing Intermediaries

Marketing intermediaries are firms that help the company promote, sell, and distribute its goods to final buyers.

1). Resellers are distribution channel firms that help the company find customers or make sales to them.

2). These include wholesalers and retailers who buy and resell merchandise.

3). Resellers often perform important functions more cheaply than the company can perform itself. However, seeking and working with resellers is not easy because of the power that some demand and use.

Physical distribution firms help the company to stock and move goods from their points of origin to their destinations. Examples would be warehouses (that store and protect goods before they move to the next destination).

Marketing services agencies (such as marketing research firms, advertising agencies, media firms, etc.) help the company target and promote its products to the right markets.

Financial intermediaries (such as banks, credit companies, insurance companies, etc.) help finance transactions and insure against risks associated with buying and selling goods.

Customers

The company must study its customer markets closely since each market has its own special characteristics. These markets normally include:

1). Consumer markets (individuals and households that buy goods and services for personal consumption).

2). Business markets (buy goods and services for further processing or for use in their production process).

3). Reseller markets (buy goods and services in order to resell them at a profit).

4). Government markets (agencies that buy goods and services in order to produce public services or transfer them to those who need them).

5). International markets (buyers of all types, including governments, in foreign countries).

Competitors

Every company faces a wide range of competitors. A company must secure a strategic advantage over competitors to be successful in the marketplace. No single competitive strategy is best for all companies.

Publics

A public is any group that has an actual or potential interest in or impact on an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives. A company should prepare a marketing plan for all of its major publics as well as its customer markets.

Generally, publics can be identified as being:

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