CHAPTER 3 Jerica Robison

Discussing the Concepts

1. Describe the elements of a company’s marketing environment and why marketers play a critical role in tracking environmental trends and spotting opportunities. a. A company’s marketing environment consists of the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with target customers. Like Xerox, companies constantly watch and adapt to the changing environment. b. More than any other group in the company, marketers must be environmental trend trackers and opportunity seekers. Although every manager in an organization should watch the outside environment, marketers have two special aptitudes. They have disciplined methods-marketing research and marketing intelligence-for collecting information about the marketing environment. They also spend more time in customer and competitor environments. By carefully studying the environment, marketers can adapt their strategies to meet new marketplace challenges and opportunities.

2. List some of the demographic trends of interest to marketers in the United States and discuss whether these trends pose opportunities or threats for marketers. a. Changing Age Structure of the Population Changing American Family Geographic Shifts in Population A better-educated, more white-collar, more professional population Increasing diversity b. The first trend( The changing age structure of the population), poses a threat because defining people by their birth date may be less effective than segmenting them by their lifestyle, life stage, life stage, or the common values they seek in the products they buy. The second trend (The changing American family) poses an opportunity because the significant number of women in the