Macro Environment: The Marketing Environment

The Marketing Environment

Nowadays, every marketing is surrounded by an environment, which has the direct or indirect impact on each other. This environment is made of all those factors- the internet as well as external that are somehow related to organizational functioning.

How to do Marketing Environment Analysis?

It is the accessioning of opportunities and/or threats that are present in the environment and can significantly affect the business organization. Environments can significant affect the business organization. A firm gathers relevant information relating to the environment studies them in details, takes note of changes in each factor that constitutes the environment and forecasts the future course of action for the organization.

Elements of Marketing Environment

Macro Environment:

It is an environment that has an indirect influence your business and these environmental factors are uncountable by the business.

• Demographic environment: Demographic attributes of the people who are related to the organization. These can be age, sex, marital status, education, income, occupation, and language etc.
• Economic environment: Supply of natural resources, level of income growth, natural production and national income, level of consumption, size of market, balance of payments of the nation, monetary structure, foreign trade, inflation, etc
• Socio-cultural environment: Every society is related to different social classes, different castes, cultures, values, and beliefs, lifestyle, family structure, people’s attribute towards work and life, consumption patterns, etc. These factors directly affect the demand for the goods in the market.
• Political - Legal environment: Developments on the political front governs the economy of the nation. Legislation regulating the business are the also often a product of the political configuration. Tax laws, EXIM policy capital flow restrictions, foreign trade, liberalization are the political factors impacting any organization.
• Technological environment: Any organization, which exists, needs to have technology support in the form of hardware, software and IT enabled services.These are very crucial for the effective and efficient functioning of the organization in the fast pace business environment.
• Ecological Environment: To protection to our environment, main issues are resources depletion, pollution concerns, and health issues.

Micro Environment

• Consumers: Tastes, Habits, Product or service Preferences.
• Suppliers: Bargaining power for the raw material, machine.
• Bankers and Creditors: For financing the business.
• Competitors: Playing in the industry.
• Market demand: Total demand of the individual customers
• Logistic Support: Transportation of raw material and finished goods.

Internal Environment

• Machinery
• Employee
• Assets
• Company policies and procedure

Types of Marketing

• Viral Marketing: Viral mean something spread in very shorter time such as a virus. Means any message should reach millions of viewer/follower in 2-3 days. A viral marketing also called motion, buzz and wildfire and flood-marketing.
• Green Marketing: Green Marketing is the marketing of products and services that are environmentally safe and It should be eco-friendly benefits.
• Social Media Marketing: It is the kind of promotion on social media platform such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter etc.
• The Internet or Digital Marketing: It is the kind of promotion online and digital platform such as Desktop and mobile etc.
• Industrial Marketing: It is B2B marketing such as one business to another goods and services.
• E-commerce Marketing: Developing, marketing, selling, delivering, serving and playing for products and services transacted through the internet, e-commerce broadly includes the following.
• Relationship Marketing: Relationship marketing aims to build a mutually satisfying long-term relationship with key communications in order to earn and retain their business.

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What Makes Marketing Green: Green Marketing

What is Green Marketing ?

Green Marketing is the marketing of products and services that are environmentally safe and it should be Eco-friendly benefits.Thus green marketing incorporates a broad range of activities, including product modification, changes to the production process, packaging changes, as well as modifying advertising campaign method. While defining green marketing is not a simple task where several meanings intersect and contradict each other; As for example of this will be the existence of verifying social, environmental and retail definitions attached to this term. Other similar terms used are Environment Marketing and Ecological Marketing. 

                                                                                 Green Marketing is essentially a way to brand your marketing message in order to capture more of the market by appealing to people’s desire to products and services that are better for the environment.

What are the environmental issues?

There are many environment issues impacted by the production of goods and rendering of services, and therefore there are also many ways a company can market their Eco-friendly offerings. Green Marketing can appeal to a wide variety of these issues: an item can save the water, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cut toxic pollution, clean indoor air, and /or be easily recyclable. When putting site by side with the competition, the more environmental marketing claims your product or service can make, the more likely it is the consumer will select it, provided the price point isn’t too much higher than the alternative.

What makes Marketing Green?

Green Marketing can take many forms. Following are some essential Eco-friendly aspects of these:

• Operational Sustainability: In this case, service companies and manufacturers can improve operational sustainability by reducing everyday energy and water consumption, minimising pollution, using greener material process, and properly managing waste.
• Green Products: To producing products can do many things to improve the green factor of their offerings, including choosing sustainable materials, designing a product to save energy and water, and making a product that is less toxic and more natural than competitor’s goods. Greener products will also be packaged in an Eco-friendly manner and will be made to be easily recycled or it should be composed.
• Sustainable marketing: We have to ensure that actual marketing system should be green, which is really distinct from your operational sustainability which focuses on manufacturing and production.
• Environmental Causes: If any organisational or firm can choose to promote the environmental cause. Non-profits and NGOs will engage in green marketing to get the word out about their activities, but for profits can also suppose environmental causes by making donations and advertising for this environmental do-good as part of a green marketing campaign.
• Digital Marketing Campaign: If any organisation can move promotional campaign through digital platform, that can be a huge step to save the our environment. As for example: few Year back mostly company promoted their product or services through print material,that can cause deplantation.

What makes Green Marketing environmental?

A strong commitment to nature and changing in lifestyle with great dedication towards the Eco-friendly life nature. And the best way to the commitment of consumers to either purchase green products or get involved in green activities.

• Cost Reduction:
• Competitive Pressure:
• Government Pressure:
• Social Responsibility:
• Competitive opportunities:
• Opportunities  Advantage:

4 P's of Green Marketing:

Product: Product should be designed with totally environmentally safe

Price: The product price should be very reasonable so that everyone should be can pay easily for this green product.

Promotion: Advertising should more focus on environmental friendly or physically and digitally platform and highlighted, more focus on green lifestyle.

Place: Product availability should be everywhere so that customer can buy from anywhere. 

Conclusion

Green Marketing should be not neglected in term of the economic aspect of marketing. A marketer should understand the importance of the green product. Everyone have to understand and implement and adopt the green initiative.

Why Relationship Marketing is an important in consumer age

Develop a long term relationship + build a connection + create an engagement +earn trust  =    Happy Customers!

B2B (Business 2 Business) and B2C (Business 2 Customer) -NOW THINK- P 2 P (people to people) ie also known as H2H (Human to Human)  ie personalized or  humanized marketing, whether,  it is business , politics or any other field, that  strategy integrated into the the today's world.

Relationship marketing aims to build a mutually satisfying long-term relationship with key communications in order to earn and retain their business. A marketing network consists of company and its supporting stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, retailers, ad agencies, university scientists and others.

There are four key constituents for relationship marketing-

a) Customers

b) Employees

c) Marketing partners and

d) Financial community

Why relationship marketing is an important in consumer age?

Relationship marketing impacts consumers’ decisions and their consumption satisfaction, firms establish relationship marketing programs to foster loyalty and a commitment to their product and services. At it heart, relationship marketing is all about building the trust and faith and keeping a promise to consumers. Therefore, the emphasis in relationship marketing is almost always on developing long-term bonds with customers by making them feel special and by providing them with personalized services. 

Various research says that Today’s, consumers are less loyal than in the past, due to six major forces

1. Abundance of choice

2. Availability of information

3. Entitlement

4. Commoditization

5. Insecurity

6. Time Scarcity  

It is firm’s advantage to develop a long-term relationship with existing customers because it is easier and less expensive to make an additional sale to an existing customer than to make a new sale to new sale to the new customer.

Role of Technology in Relationship Marketing

In Digital Age, Technology  plays a very  important role in relationship marketing .The internet has made it easier for companies to track, re-marketing, store, analyze and then utilize vast  ads, special deals, and expatiated service as a token of appreciate for their loyalty.

Social media sites allow business to engage their audiences in an informal and ongoing way.

Real relationship marketing is program is more than the use of database marketing tactics to things for better target customers the consumer must feel that she or he has received something for being a participant in the relationship.

Electronic Customer relationship management (eCRM) is marketing tools that approach more on customer retention rather than customer acquisition.
Digital platform engages your audiences instantly, got an instant feedback from the customer.

Conclusion

Retention of the customer is an important strategy for business and a financial point of view, retention is useful as the cost of acquisition only occurs once at the start of the relationship, the longer the relationship the lower the overall costs. Overall, in digital age chances to returning customer (Welcome Back) is increased because of tracking and engaging the customer towards the brand. As we know that attracting a new customer can cost five times as much doing a good to retain the existing one.

                  In the past, it would have been impossible to keep useful records about every single client, but technology makes it easy for companies to automate their marketing efforts.
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Viral Marketing: A Buzz Marketing

The ultimate approach that encourages character or any individual to convey the promotional message to someone, creating the possible for exponential marketing expansion in the message’s hype and wave. A viral marketing also called motion, buzz and wildfire and flood-marketing. And other also has given a different type of name. We can say that viral marketing has a deep connection between the digital media such as social media, YouTube, email, and WOM (word of mouth).

Viral mean something spread in very shorter time such as a virus. Means any message should reach millions of viewer/follower in 2-3 days organically. Consider some of the example such as 

A Viral Marketing Example:

1.ALS Ice Bucket Challenge:

The ice bucket challenge after some time it’s called ALS Ice bucket challenge, In that campaign, an individual accepting the challenge and dumping the a bucket of ice water on someone’s head to promoting the awareness about the disease such as AMYOTROPHIC LATERAL SCLEROSIS (ALS also known as Motor neuron disease and in the US Lou Gehring’S Disease) The strategy behind the this campaign was encourages to people to donation to research and development to ALS disease. It went viral on digitally especially on social media in mid of 2014. Including many big gunmen also accepted the ALS Ice Bucket challenge. Even Mr. Obama,US president has also accepted the challenge.

    2. Always Like A Girl – June 2014

With feminism and gender equality campaigns securing lots of publicity in 2014 the Always  Like A Girl was a real hit. The original video has over 62.7M views on YouTube till date.

3. Volvo Trucks the Epic Split

November 2013 Jean-Claude Van Damme’s epic video doing the splits on two reversing Volvo trucks amazed everyone when it was released in 2013. Who’d have thought a truck video could secure over 76.4M views?
The big question is that how the people engaged worldwide in talking about the truck? And how do you get truckers interested in driving them? For Volvo truck, the answer was Think Big. So in this series of Viral film, it created testing new features, the “Live Test”.
As a company, previously, Volvo truck had taken a traditional approach to launch marketing since a long time. But the before the viral campaign, the company had worked with many different types of traditional marketing approaches such as Electronic media and print media including Public relation, social media, YouTube.

The two importance things worked with this campaign film

The emotional connection the team found truck drivers have with the trucks they drive:-which got the creative thinking of how to present the new truck in an emotionally engaging way.

And The second was the volume of people who influence truck buying decisions- From driver to his or her family and friends, colleagues and bosses, clients and the business whose products the truck carry.

“Emotion is a very powerful technique to express product benefits.”

Live on TV would be very expensive to create a campaign with the broad accomplish. The campaign has very much benefit on, However, Digital media/marketing and viral gave the opportunity to this campaign to reached a wider audience in a new digital platform.

4.Evien 
The inner child that keeps on given

Evian's babies are viral on the digital marketing platform in 2009 ,With more than 25m viewer in 2 months ,Till date 135m views on youtube.

Buzz or viral marketing categories in two Uncodified and Codified Buzz. 

1.  Uncodified Buzz- It occurs while inventors convene with new product or services or movies etc, such as they like and passes views on the particular information. In this case very difficult to analyse the communication that comes from friends, is very high and it is uncontrollable by the organization/firm, and views could be positive or negative.

2. Codified Buzz- But in this case, it already  was written and customized  by organization/firm with help of previous information such as endorsements, testimonials, trial version, gift certifications and  chatting information  and others so .

Then it should be observable and scalable and trialability of the viral marketing program for the new product is critical elements. For Example A money Back guarantee makes trust and trialability a win-win undertaking for the customers because it reduces the risk perceived with regards to making   a purchase.

As we have seen in, above, that every campaign (Viral) have specific planning and execution to become a viral (campaign) with help of digital technology.

But the “viral” can be possible spread swiftly by the help of word of mouth and digital marketing especially via  smartphone user because It has access optimum time with users, and the message should bound to share by the viewer.

Following are some points that lead to content viral but it is not guaranteed:

1. Content should be emotionally strong

2. Views and allow sharing on digital platform

3. World of mouth

4. Connect the audiences and swift responses