STEEP Analysis: Monitoring Trends i

STEEP Analysis: Monitoring Trends in the Societal and Natural Environments. As shown in Table 4–1, large corporations categorize the societal environment in any one geographic region into four areas and focus their scanning in each area on trends that have corporate wide relevance. By including trends from the natural environment, this scanning can be called STEEP Analysis, the scanning of Sociocultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Political-legal environmental forces. (It may also be called PESTEL Analysis for Political, Economic, Sociocultural, Technological, Ecological, and Legal forces.) Obviously, trends in any one area may be very important to firms in one industry but of lesser importance to firms in other industries.