Global and Domestic Marketing

Global and Domestic Marketing

There are many external environmental factors that marketing. Political, cultural and technological factors are several that affect marketing decisions on a domestic and a global scale. A company can gain valuable incite on the factors effecting their business through an external environment analysis. An analysis of the target market for a company's goods or services can provide understanding of environmental factors that need to be addressed for a products success.

When considering the political factors that affect marketing plan it is necessary to note that political environment can be very complicated and is in the majority of instances ever changing. The political environment can directly affect a company, or even entire industries, marketing plan. When considering domestic or global political factors several issues need to be analyzed.

Is the political environment stable? It is safe to assume all political environments change over time, but is the market being investigated unusually volatile? Is there unrest within the population that might lead to a sudden change, and how would that affect the marketing plan.

What is the decision making structure? Does the market have a legislative or a monarchy/dictator structure? Regardless of structure, are decisions made in a rational and timely fashion. Will the employment laws or environmental regulations of the target market affect the marketing plan? One of the most important political factors is tariffs and trade restrictions, which can severely influence a company's market plan. Political factors that effect marketing can be overt and covert. Trade restrictions are overt examples of how the political environment affects a marketing plan. The recent discovery of a few cows that tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease, resulted the ban of beef imports to several European and Asian countries. (CNN.com [CNN], 2003, 1) Political factors may not be so obvious, often businesses are faced with ethical decisions as they try to market their products. Many countries still allow officials to require bribes in order to gain access to a market.

Cultural factors encompass a wide variety of issues including, language and communication, education, social structure, values, and aesthetics. Some cultural factors are long standing traditional values of a society while others reflect trends, which change more rapidly.

There are thousands of languages through out the world and a word or phrase may have a completely different meaning when translated to a different language. These translation errors can seriously alter a companies promotional message, when Coors put its slogan "turn it loose" into Spanish the translation was "Suffer from diarrhea", an American t-shirt manufacture printed shirts for the Pope visit to Spanish speaking areas. They were supposed to read, "I saw the Pope" (el Papa), unfortunately, the shirts were only good for the Idaho market. El Papa was replaced with la Papa, so the shirts read, "I saw the potato". Pepsi surly saw a dramatic increase in sales in China when "come alive with the Pepsi generation" translated into "Pepsi brings your ancestors back to life".

Trends need also to be analyzed to