External marketing environment

This article describes an organization's external marketing environment. When you want to start a project or initiative, it is important to identify a number of things to determine how you will "market" it. This is called marketing. This involves looking at your own or internal environment as well as the outside world. That has to do with pricing your initiative, for example, and it also leads to insights into how you're going to communicate. Based on the marketing process, you can more easily create a plan of action, a budget and a communication plan.

What is the external marketing environment?

This section relates primarily to everything and everyone around your company, initiative or project. By properly analyzing this, you can identify where possible opportunities may lie and where possible threats may arise from. Roughly speaking, it consists of two parts:

• Organizations, people and things that you do (indirectly) influence (also called the meso-environment ).
• Organizations, people and things you have little or no influence over (also called the macro environment ).

The part of the external environment to be influenced

This section deals very much with the market in which you operate. There are a number of factors (aka people or organizations) in the environment of your organization, project or initiative that you can influence. Of course, you can't just change someone else, so by influencing this we mean that you can change your own way of seeing and working. After all, this influences who you focus on, who you want to work with and who you will encounter during the implementation. This part of the environment consists of a number of sections or groups of people and organizations. You can make separate analyses of these.

Target groups

Target audiences mean the ultimate buyers of your product or initiative. They are the people who buy something from you or attend an event. They can be private individuals as well as other organizations or companies. You want to know who these are, what numbers they are and how best to excite and reach them through communication. You get to work on segmenting this part of the market. Elsewhere on this website, we have an entire article devoted to analyzing and determining target audiences.

Competition

At the word competition, some people immediately startle, especially those who are primarily concerned with making as much money as possible. After all, competitors can eat a piece of "your pie," or in other words hold a share of the market. However, especially in the cultural sector, competitors need not be so scary or annoying at all. You'll notice that if you look at it in any of the following ways, for example:

• Can you perhaps collaborate with competitors? Perhaps you can jointly purchase facilities or share knowledge. In that case, they are almost colleagues of yours.
• You may be working with your competitors to strengthen and make a particular geographic area or part of the market better known, making it better for everyone.
• Perhaps the competitor offers the same type of product but targets a different part of the market. This could include different target groups or a different geographic part of the market.

Types of competition

It is good to take a moment to review the different types of competition. Not everyone has to actually be a competitor, as indicated above. Conversely, you may have competition from something that is totally unlike what you offer in terms of content. For example, a director of very well-known Arnhem zoo once said; "the home improvement centers and garden centers are a bigger competitor for us than another zoo. In the marketing world, competitors are usually classified according to four types of characteristics. The best-known example to indicate the distinction is the product beer:

Brand competition

This is competition where the product or range is virtually identical to someone else's. A buyer then looks mainly at the feeling he or she has with a brand. An example is pilsner, identical types of beer but from two different brands.

Product Competition

This involves different types of a product within a given product group. In the example of beer, you can think of competition between pilsner and non-alcoholic or specialty beer.

Generic competition

In this case it is about fulfilling a particular need. In the case we take beer as an example, you can think of the need to "drink something" (the buyer is thirsty).

Need or budget competition

Finally, another factor is that the buyer can only spend his money once. He or she simply cannot buy everything and will therefore have to make choices in the satisfaction of needs. The example of the zoo above fits into this. In the case of beer: a person can go out for an evening beer or save up the money to go on vacation.

Suppliers

Another part of the marketing environment to be influenced is suppliers. Often when you get started with your product or initiative, you need other people or organizations to do so. For example, they are the parties that can supply raw materials, make something for you or be staffing during a production. These can be self-employed or companies with salaried people.

Tips on working with suppliers

• Always request quotes from multiple parties. That way you can compare the differences in offer and price.
• Try to estimate how big the supplier's company is. Often see a beautiful website that makes you think they have dozens of people working there and then it turns out to be a sole proprietorship. That can affect the professionalism and whether they can meet the obligations.
• Look for colleagues (or competitors) who already have experiences with a supplier. Perhaps they can influence your choice.
• Determine whether you need to pay (part of) the costs up front. Often suppliers ask this when they first start working with you. Then you will need to be able to do this pre-funding.
• Always make sure you confirm agreements on paper. Consider not only the amount of money but also, for example, the delivery times and the quality it should meet.

Stakeholders

This group of people or organizations are sometimes called the audience groups. This is different from a target group. They are those parties that:

• Be affected by your initiative or project.
• Be able to influence your initiative or project.

Those stakeholders, by the way, may be within your organization or outside it. Marketing often looks at the balance between how much influence they have on your project or initiative and how much interest they have in it. That way, you can determine the extent to which you need to involve or inform them.

Examples of stakeholders

Sometimes the line between a stakeholder and, say, a supplier is a little blurry. That's not a big deal because it's better to include it twice in your analysis than not at all. Below are some examples of stakeholders, with that note that this list is obviously not complete and will be different for each project or initiative in terms of scope and content.

• Neighbors
• Lenders such as sponsors, funds or other grant makers and banks
• Governments
• The media
• A venue owner

Please note

We have explained this piece above in a nutshell. Of course, it may be different for each organization, project or initiative. Finally, different or additional terms are regularly used in marketing. There is an awful lot of information on the worldwide Web about the marketing process and the specific environments you will encounter in the process.

The unaffected part of the external environment

The previous section discussed the parties and individuals in the marketing environment that can be indirectly influenced by you. However, there are also a lot of things happening on the world stage that you cannot actually influence at all. Yet this can be the other way around. They are called trends and developments and they apply to a particular geographic area such as a city, country or the entire world. By analyzing these well, you might decide to adjust your product or service slightly, either in form or in the way of marketing it. In marketing, the same set of characteristics is almost always used to identify these trends and developments. This is also called a DESTEP analysis. These are the first letters of the various components. Below we briefly explain the different components but feel free to enter this term in the search engine as well.

Demographic trends

These relate to the size, growth and composition of the population. Consider, for example, the ages of your target audience and the geographic demarcation of the area in which you operate.

Economic developments

This is about the economy, which in this day and age seems to affect almost everything. You can think of things like a country's Gross Domestic Product, people's spending patterns, poverty in a city or country and economic growth that may or may not be there.

Socio-cultural developments

This section refers to the culture and cultures prevailing in a particular area. This includes, for example, the norms and values we have agreed to share with each other.

Technological developments

With the huge increase in knowledge comes more and more innovations, digital developments and new opportunities.

Ecological developments

These developments are also very current at the moment. They include environmental regulations and sustainability practices.

Political legal developments

This section has everything to do with laws and regulations agreed upon in a city, country or even worldwide. Think, for example, of safety regulations, collective bargaining agreements and, as is very current now, the Deregulation of Labor Relations Act (Wet DBA).

If, from your expertise, you yourself have knowledge that would fit this topic, or if you see opportunities to improve this text, we look forward to receiving your message at info@cultuuracademy.nl.