The first and foremost fundamental principles of marketing management are found in the marketing mix. It is the framework that help marketers on how they will meet customers’ demands. As defined, marketing is an art of science which ought to create, determine, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings that are valuable to satisfy customers’ needs and wants. With this definition, marketing transcends from the belief that “marketing just only takes place in the sales of goods/services” as it can also affect several other business stakeholders i.e. supply chain partners and society at large.
Like many other things, the concept of marketing evolves through time specifically: production-oriented era, sales-oriented era, market-based era, and value-based marketing era. Undeniably, it manifests that marketing improves and continues to satiate customers’ key requirements. In addition, the influence of technology in business helps marketing to modernize its strategies and activities. For instance, marketing analytics can be monitored more systematically; it helps us to collect data and interpret into useful knowledge. With the advent of technology, marketing has to offer diverse media for marketers and businessmen.
Our purpose towards continuous satisfying all the needs and wants of customers is present to the immediate environment. Marketing does its capabilities and extensively adapt to the fast-changing environment in order to establish up-to-date strategies. An addition, marketing environment is influenced by the macro environment where the following categories are included: demographics, economics, socio-cultural. technological, ecological, and political or legal (DESTEP). It is important to research about our market to gain knowledge on how we will be able to address the needs and wants correctly.
Immediate environment has many more to offer, but what caught my interest is the value creation. We as marketers, our purpose is not only satiate customers’ demands but also, we want to create an admirable image and trust to our brand. Explicitly, it requires organizations to consider potential benefits for the customers, determine what customers do, want, need, and/or feel.
‘Your competitors know you better,’ a proverb came from my professor as he explained competitors have great influence on the marketing environment. Like in research, business competitors are considered as independent, or uncontrollable variable that businessmen must examine and analyze. Competition eventually occurs due to businesses are selling products that are similar or different. Well, if a business does not want to compete with other firms, should it find a place with no competition. However, a competitor free environment is extremely rare.
Essentially, to understand the marketing environment with competitors, we must understand the key differences of types of competition: monopoly, oligopoly, perfect competition, and monopolistic competition. Monopoly and monopolistic competition situations usually occur when a business thoroughly controls a product in the market. On the other hand, pure competition and oligopoly have little or no differentiation since they offer similar marketing mixes and customers’ perspective see the other product as alternative good/service. Since they are not able to differentiate one offering to other, they usually compete with low prices causing their profit to decrease.
Aside from the immediate environment, there are still variables that a business must consider. These are culture, demographics, social trends, technological advancement, economic situation, and political/regulatory environment (CDSTEP). These factors are called macro-environmental factors; aspects of external environment that directly affect the business.
More specifically, culture entails the shared meanings, beliefs, morals, values, and customs of a certain group of people in the society. Two types of cultures are named country culture and regional culture. An addition, demographics provides businesses the information about the human population specifically by segmenting it by age, gender, income, education, etc. Social trends can also contribute to culture since it conveys popularity and advancement. Technological advancement shows that consumers’ demand on the breakthrough of technology. Economic situation presents the status of how foreign and national countries’ economy progress. Political/regulatory environment includes laws, rules, and regulations regarding the business legislation in the country.
In consumer behavior, culture is considered as the most essential variable that immensely influence consumer buying behavior. Cultural factors are segmented into three types namely: culture, subculture, and social class. Culture is the determinant of customers’ needs and wants that they may acquired due to influences of their family, environment, or key institutions. Subculture refers to a sub-unit of culture that provides identity and belongingness e.g. nationalities, races, religions, geographic locations, etc. Social class refers to the hierarchy of groups based on given standards such as economic status, educational attainment, occupation, etc.
Understanding culture of the customers provides us knowledge about our potential market. With the utilization of research, we will be able to create and deliver product/service that suit to their preferences.
Trends with a basis on demographics seem to be more reliable for short or long-term activities. Demographic comprises of nominal/continuous data about the population such as age, gender, educational attainment, etc. Demographic information about the consensus can help marketers to monitor social trends. For instance, 18 – 21 age group are the usual customers of a coffee shop, women spend more time than men when buying in a grocery store. Being able to gather large data is a reward for market researchers as it implies more data, more reliability, and validity of data. However, it may become time-consuming for marketers since interpreting a large data is a difficult task.
The economic environment focuses on the purchasing power of the potential buyers in the market which helps marketers to identify if they are capable of obtaining the product/service. The available purchasing power is based on the wages or incomes, liquid assets, debts, credit availability, and customer decision – where culture greatly influence consumer. With these instances, marketers should monitor on the trends affecting purchasing power as it can produce a huge impact on businesses. Moreover, it is a must for a business to understand income distribution since it brings us the indication of income distribution patterns and allows us to strategize effective marketing plan. Income distribution patterns on different countries are very low incomes; mostly low incomes; very low, very high incomes; low, medium, high incomes; and mostly medium incomes.
With the advent of technological advancement, there are advantages that can benefit the society. However, it also posed environmental issues, labor risks, and outdated laws. Technological advancement helps us to easily communicate with the potential market. For instance, social media platform as a primary medium of marketing ease the effects of the pandemic in the country since it serves as alternative marketplace for everyone. With this, further research and studies are done to create useful tools that marketers can utilize to execute their marketing plans and strategies. In addition, development of technology provides unprecedented job opportunities, up-to-date products and more.
However, with the advent of technological advancement, sometimes, there are situation where no regulations and laws are implemented about the supervision of product/service. In a TED Talk presentation on this unit, the speaker said that technology leads, law follows. I would like to relate the quote to the relevant instance specifically the ABS-CBN Black Box. It happened that there are no updated laws and regulations about the number of frequencies a broadcasting station is allow. Thus, in order to have supervision, the political/legal aspect of the country must amend new laws that is relevant to the technological innovation.
The previous units present the importance of marketing mixes, micro-environmental factors that can greatly affect consumer buying decision-making, and its advantageous tool to businesses. Understanding these concepts help us to analyze what are the effective and efficient ways of business activities and processes. Besides, I learned that marketing is a state-of-art profession that deals with identification, creation, communication, delivery, and satisfaction of the customers’ key requirements. Marketing is not just about sales but also engage in the supply chain management within business partners and potential markets that can help create trust and value.
With these knowledges on hand, this unit reveals the strategic planning process of businesses. For reference, strategic planning is done not to be executed on the present times but for the next few years or even a decade. With this, it helps us marketers to reevaluate our marketing plan, so that, we can realign our current processes into desired outcomes. To obtain an achievable company strategic planning, a business must have a strong mission statement that will remind employees and marketers why they are doing their jobs at the first place, how they will do it, to whom they will serve, and what ways to achieve it.
Having the essential information with you from the previous units, the analysis of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities or famously known as SWOT Analysis by Albert Humphrey (1960) is prevalent in business world. It is a situational analysis of both internal and external factors that highlights the advantages and disadvantages of a business.
More specifically, strengths and opportunities consist of advantages of a business, otherwise, weaknesses and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are considered as internal factors since the company can control these variables and can be able to cause an effect on its processes. On the other hand, opportunities and threats are external factors on which a business has no control overall. Being able to construct a detailed and concrete SWOT Analysis can reveal to marketers what to anticipate and what to do. In other words, it helps you shows what you build good, what you are lacking, and what tools are useable to attain your business competitive edge.
