Question

Please list and describe six environmental forces that impact business. Provide a specific example of how the careful consideration of each environmental force is vital to business planning.

Answer 1

SIX ENVIRONMENTAL FORCES THAT BUSINESS:

There are six main external factors that influence the marketing strategy of a business or organization. Some organizations may perform a SLEPT (social, legal, economical, political, and technological) analysis to obtain information on major external influences on their business.

These include economic, social, legal, technological and political factors. Business environment is therefore, the total of all external forces, which affect the organization and the business operations (Kotler &Armstrong 2004)

Your knowledge on this external environment of marketing enables you as a marketer to foresee possible occurrences from the external environment that can...

Influence your marketing objectives, and then formulate effective strategies to adapt your business to it and overturning the seemingly threat into opportunities.

There are two environment of marketing;

1.The internal environment

2. External environments.

your job as a marketer is to create effective flow of goods and services from the point of production to your consumers despite various controllable and uncontrollable forces that do militate for or against you while making profit for your organization.

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 SIX External Environment are:

1. Competition
2. Government policies
3. Natural forces
4. Social and cultural forces
5. Demographic factors
6. 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.
• The 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.

These few words about the External environment impacts on the business and also gave the example.