Environmental Information Through Environmental Scanning

Environmental Information Through Environmental Scanning

  • Submitted By: snowingart
  • Date Submitted: 04/20/2010 11:25 AM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 1639
  • Page: 7
  • Views: 976

Environmental scanning provides environmental information that identifies future market opportunities and threats. Important factors within the external environment that can influence a company’s marketing strategies and decisions are social, demographic, economic, technological, political and legal, and competitive factors. Changes in these factors implicate changes in the environment which consumers live and make purchase decisions. Marketing managers reshape marketing strategies and make them effective in response to the external environmental changes.

In the following paper, I’m going to discuss factors that have been mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as address several actions that McDonald’s Corporation takes in response to the changes of external environment.

Social Factors

Social factors, including attitudes, values, and lifestyles, influence the products that people buy, the prices people are willing to pay for them, and the effectiveness of specific promotions.

One of the six most important characteristics of product quality that are valued by U.S. consumers is low price. Aiming to become a destination for buying beverages, McDonald’s has recently released its marketing plan on March 18, 2010, to run a promotion of $1 soft drinks, no matter the size, for 150 days, starting after Memorial Day[1]. The newly announced promotion is in hope of stealing customers from other fast-food chains and from other places that offer soft drink, such as 7-Eleven. The promotion also matches with the component lifestyles that Americans value today. As the component lifestyles increase the complexity of consumers’ buying habits, offering $1 drinks of all kinds and sizes can be preferable to consumers in U.S.

In addition to the $1 dollar soft drinks promotion, McDonald’s also reported a 4.8% rise in sales in February 2010, follows a 2.6% increase in January 2010[2]. According to the company, the increase in sales is the success of McDonald’s...

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