Assignment
Select a specific product or service.
1. Who are the most serious competitors to your chosen product or service and what do you believe is the cause for the success of these competitors? How is your chosen product or service surviving with this competition? Compare strengths and weaknesses of the competitive product or service compared to your chosen brand.
2. Prepare a 2-3 page APA style paper for marketing environmental analysis that explains how the appropriate trends in the macro-environmental variables drove the creation and/or impact of your chosen product/service
Refer to the following for #2
A number of outside forces shape the marketing environment. Significant trends affect a firm's customers and their needs, competitors, channel of distribution and suppliers. Temporary trends (fads) may come and go so quickly that they may not be relevant. Long term trends (mega trends) may totally alter an aspect of a business to the point where if not anticipated; the business may not survive.
In order to better understand the nature of these trends, marketers break them into six distinct areas:
Demographics
Economic
Environmental/Natural
Technological
Political/Legal
Social/Cultural
Note: In examining the Economic Trends, look at changes in the GDP, inflation, unemployment levels, savings rates, interest rates, or the business cycle. The retail price of the product is not an economic trend.
Develop a 2 to 3 page environmental marketing analysis for your chosen product/service that examines how trends within each of the six macro-environmental areas may have driven the development and/or impacted your product/service.
Your product/service may have been developed in response to a trend or in anticipation of a trend to come. There may not be an applicable trend in each of the six areas, or there might be two or three trends in one area. Every situation is different. Describe the effect of the macro-environment on your product or service.
After identifying the trends and their relevance to your product or service, where possible explain why the marketer chose to respond to the trends in the way that he/she did.