Marketing activities are designed to help the company in making a profit by ensuring the production of goods that will be attractive from the point of view of the consumer. For these purposes, serves both external and internal marketing environment. The activities of marketing departments depend on many factors that influence from the outside. This is the microenvironment of the enterprise, that is, those components that are directly related to the company itself and can be controlled from within the company. It is also a macro environment - that is, factors that cannot be controlled, do not depend on the actions of the company, but can have an unexpected and spontaneous effect on its activities, like a tsunami. In this regard, a special study of these factors is required to be able to predict events and identify threats that could cause the company unexpected disruptions in its activities.
The macro environment of the company for its study requires analysis of the capabilities of the enterprise, the position that the company occupies in the market and analysis of market segmentation. The necessary information about the macroenvironment independent of the enterprise and not controlled by it can be obtained from various sources: published documents, information on relevant websites on the Internet, as well as through the purchase of studies already conducted by the respective companies.
The macroenvironment has such a feature that it cannot be seen, it cannot be influenced, but it can be taken into account and predicted. These factors include:
- Political, which should take into account government stability, state regulation of entrepreneurship and competition in industries, changes in legislation.
- The economic factor that determines the purchasing power of the consumer, the exchange rate, inflation, unemployment, household incomes, taxation, credit, the cost of the consumer basket and energy prices.
- The demographic factor. Here, the division by gender and age of the population plays a role. The size of the population and the level of migration matter. And also takes into account the division into rural and urban regions.
- The macroenvironment also contains a social factor that takes into account people's attitude to work, its position in relation to the state, quality of life, consumer activity, etc.
- Scientific and technical factors are most able to influence marketing activities, as new technologies that constantly appear in production create new markets. In this regard, it is necessary to be able to timely rebuild and master new methods and more promising products.
All these factors together determine the marketing activities of the enterprise. Before you start collecting the information that a macro environment represents, you need to make a list to clearly understand what data you need to obtain. Then you need to decide which resources will be used as sources for obtaining information. These can be statistics committees, general economic magazines and newspapers, resources on the Internet - industry portals, websites of specialized companies that publish market surveys and research, as well as portals that sell ready-made studies.
After the necessary information is collected, it is necessary to evaluate the available documents, how much you can trust the information contained in them, evaluate the authors who created the documents and their competence in this matter, the time of collecting information on the subject of its relevance.
Based on the foregoing, it becomes clear that the macroenvironment of the company and its internal component are intertwined in the most direct way and require careful research and analysis. Indeed, it is the external environment that contains the necessary resources, as well as opportunities for the successful development of the company. And, accordingly, its analysis is the most important tool in the marketing activities of an enterprise.