The external environment of marketing
The external environment of marketing is comprises of those uncontrollable forces outside of your organization. These forces that can influence your business are uncontrollable because you do not have any control over them, but yet, you can respond and adapt to their treats and influences with your controllable mix element from your internal environment.
The uncontrollable forces in the external environment are:
· Competition
· Government policies
· Natural forces
· social and cultural forces
· Demographic factors
· Technological changes
(1) Competition: competition refers to the numbers of similar competitive product brands’ marketers in your industry, their size and market capitalizations. You as a marketer might not have direct influence on them, but it’s important that you monitor their activities, and then design effective strategies using your controllable variables.
(2) Governmental policies: the government policies refers to the laws and legality that guilds the land, they go a long way to affect your business operations as a marketer. For instance, government restriction on the importation of a particular product might hinder the marketers playing in that particular field.
(3) Natural forces: this refers to the physical environment, it comprises of the available or lacks of natural resources that can vacillated or hinder your production output.
(4) social and cultural forces: the social and cultural forces refers to the structure and dynamics of individuals and groups and their behaviors, believes, thought patterns and lifestyles, friendship etc many of this trends goes a long way to affect your marketing operations.
(5) Demographic factors: demography refers to study of people, such as their age, sex, marital status, occupation, family size etc. Though, demography is uncontrollable because you cannot control the sex, age, marital status in your external environment, but accurate forecast of it goes a long way to enabling you as a marketer forecast future trend and consumptions of your product.
(6) Technological changes: technology post much challenges to marketers, it affects the kind of product that you as a marketer can offer, For instance, technology have changed products like typewriting machines into a more proficient computer systems. You cannot stop the advancement of technology, but you can learn to adapt to it changes.