The marketing environmental scan: The process of continually acquiring information on events occurring outside the organization to identify trends, opportunities, and threats to your business.
6 forces marketers look at:
- Demographic forces: The statistical data on a population according to characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, income and occupation.
- Socio-cultural forces: Cultural values, ideas, and attitudes, as well as society’s morals and beliefs. (Health and fitness, ethnic foods…)
- Economic forces: The collective income, expenditures, and resources that affect the cost of running a business or a household. (Macro: country’s economy, inflation, recession), (Micro: supply and demand, gross income (before tax), disposable income (after tax), discretionary income (after tax and necessities).
- Technological forces: Inventions from applied science or engineering research. This means the replacement of old technology with new more advanced products.
- Competitive forces: Alternative products that can satisfy a specific market’s needs. Direct: very similar products in the same category. Indirect: Same category but a different product (Swiss chalet and pizza).
- Perfect competition: Many sellers with nearly identical products.
- Monopolistic competition: Type of competition where a large number of sellers compete with each other, offering customers similar or substitute products.
- Oligopoly: Competition with only a few suppliers.
- Monopoly: Competition with only one supplier
- Regulatory forces: Restrictions placed on marketing practices by government and industry associations. Examples are: Competition Bureau (Administration and enforcement of competition act, the consumer packaging and labeling act, the textile labeling act…), Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications commission administers the broadcast and telecommunications Act, setting guidelines for broadcast standards, adjudicating on the ownership of media outlets, and approving broadcast license’s for TV and radio stations.
