The Marketing Environment

02.10.17

Yesterday we focused on the learning materials of international marketing and brand management. We started by looking into the dynamic nature of the marketing environment which later looked into the differences between micro and macro environmental factors.

This session was a great way of refreshing our minds on marketing and to get us thinking about how our two chosen brands market themselves using the PESTLE method.

What are the main reasons for conducting market research?

With the economy becoming more and more competitive each and everyday, it is important to have the knowledge you need to adapt to your customers wants and needs along with identifying new business growth and opportunities and changing market trends. Here is a list of other reasons as to why conducting market research is good for a business:

• To discover potential customers and the needs for those customers
• Identify the problem areas in your business
• Understand why your customers have chosen your service over other competitors
• To know who your competitors are
• Recognize new areas for expansion, and increase your customer base
• Set achievable targets for business growth, sales, and latest product developments
• To learn how to develop effective strategies

What are the different methods used in market research?

Primary and Secondary

Primary market research is research that is done by the business/brand itself, gathering their own information that can be used to either improve their products, services and functions. It is also known as a field research as it is undertaken from scratch without using any other information or data that already exists through other sources. Primary market research is the most common type of research methods to use.

Secondary market research

As opposed to primary market research, Secondary market research is a research technique that does not involves collecting research from scratch, instead it doe the complete opposite of that. Secondary market research relies on other existing information and data of other multiple sources which has been collected by other people.

Secondary market research takes into account many different sources for collection of information including newspapers, magazines, the internet, etc. One of the benefits of doing secondary market research is that it can take a lot less time and often free.

There is also Qualitative and Quantitative research that is used in market research. For example:

Qualitative research

Usually undertakes the opinions and the emotional feelings of the customers. This type of research tries to create a visual view on what the customer is thinking by getting behind their mind in order to fathom what they see lacking or whether they genuinely like the products. Examples of qualitative research could be participating in face to face interviews.

Quantitative research

This type of research involves hard facts and statistical data rather than the feelings and opinions of the customers or consumers. This research can provide useful information on both primary and secondary market research. Some examples of quantitative research include exit surveys, questionnaires, on-site fieldwork and the shopping bag survey.

These questions were given to us to begin thinking about how our chosen brands market themselves. The marketing environment consists ofthe following two factors, being actors and forces. Both of these factors affect a company's capability to operate effectively in providing products and services to its customers.

Actors (acting out) - encouraging change.

Actors are things that help you change and act/adapt, for example business competitors.

Forces (forcing change) - you have to change with it.

Forces are things that force you to change, for example you suddenly need to become sustainable.

The environmental forces are usually analysed using macro and micro environment.

The company or brand must always be aware of its environment which includes:

• Customers
• Competitors
• Suppliers
• Intermediaries
• Publics

All of these micro environment elements link to the bigger picture which is the macro environment. This links us on to PESTLE which stands for:

• P – Political
• E – Economic
• S – Social
• T – Technological
• E – Environmental
• L – Legal

Macro - uncontrollable (meaning outside the business - the world)

Micro - controllable (meaning inside the business)

In order to understand our brands fully in terms of the business and marketing, we were suggested to look at what the two brands do differently in regards to PESTLE, and to also analyse them by comparing and contrasting their market research methods.

For businesses to fail they will be:

• Arrogant
• Be comfortable where they are currently at - not willing to expand
• Lack of focus on the customer's - loss of care
• Loss of relevance
• Disregard for the changing world
• Failure to innovate - be creative
• Back tracking to basics
• Lack of coherent plan to win

By making yourself aware of the marketing environment you are benefitting with:

• Being aware and responsive to the environmental changes
• Have a better planning and decision making strategy
• Have improved diversification decisions and resource allocation
• Better strategic fit between company, consumer and environment