Marketing decisions
Wal-Mart, a multinational company that deals with the different economic environments, owns about 8500 outlets, distributed across fifteen nations (Pride & Ferrell, 2006). The business environment composition of this company means that they have to use distinctive marketing tactics. Important environmental factors for developing marketing decisions are customers, social factors, regulatory team, competitors, economics, and geography. One needs to understand and be able to keep adapting to the dynamic needs of a customer. Through a company’s competitors, one can exploit the opponent’s weaknesses for own gain. A nation’s economy could be strong or poor. Healthy competition or lack of it highly affects the way marketing decisions are made.
Technological impact
Both software and hardware technologies have a major impact on marketing today. Through technology, the internet is now widely used and easily accessible. With its uptake, companies have developed websites and other marketing software that they use to market themselves across the online community. The internet has made it easier, faster, and cheaper for customers to access goods and services. E-commerce is a technology that enables one to buy and sell goods and services online with ease from almost anywhere in the world is like opening a shop on every continent. If the order is for goods, they are shipped to the customer.
Amazon, for example, makes money out of selling books online. Technology has aided marketing a lot in that the tools and platforms used are effective, and one can track the number of people a marketing campaign has been able to reach. It also changes the tact of the marketing planners who now have to consider the diversity of the online users in developing any marketing campaigns (Horrigan, 2010).
Social and ethical responsibility
Ethics are a set of rules that govern the actions of the marketing department. Integrity in business is an asset that both the employees as well as the customers do value. This goes a long way in marketing the business. Marketing is a competitive and vital field sometimes players are involved in unlawful methods like economic espionage or bribery. These involve obtaining the opponent’s details unlawfully with the aim of using them to profit from one.
Ethical responsibility requires the business to follow a set of universally accepted norms (Horrigan, 2010). This creates a level playing field across the vast internet platform. In marketing, ethics help the team to aim to produce their products focusing on producing the best.
Social responsibility is about the business being a member of the society, hence, accountable for it. Companies do practice social responsibility as a way of maintaining the environment in which they operate from or towards the general public. Companies have taken up green marketing, which is Eco friendly. They also do participate in charity work, which helps alleviate any form of suffering from the general population. Contributing to a cleaner and healthier society the ripple effect will be on the additional uptake of the company’s products in the market. Society then links Wal-Mart, to the responsible and healthy institution which it takes as one of their own even if the company could be a multinational (Horrigan, 2010).
Conclusion
Marketing is one of the most important departments in any firm. It is important for marketers to understand the different factors that are related to marketing performance before they make their decisions. Technology has changed the way goods are bought and sold. It has also brought to board both the hardware and the software that aid in marketing. Lastly, it’s important that as a company does marketing it remains responsible to its neighboring society as they determine its success.
References
Horrigan, B. (2010). Corporate social responsibility in the 21st century: Debates, models and practices across government, law and business. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Pride, W. M., & Ferrell, O. C. (2006). Marketing: Concepts and strategies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.