These outside forces affect an organization's marketing, yet the organization has no control over them. Marketers observe trends in the macroenvironment to predict pressure on the factors -- like the internal environment and the marketing mix -- that the organization can control. On the Internet, marketers can find much of the data to support their predictions.

You need to balance the relative strength of these forces. What drives history? The fancy word is determinism: does technology drive history? Do great political leaders drive history? Money? The "people"? Raw materials?

To answer those questions, most people go with their feelings based on personal experience. Part of going to grad school is to further replace your feelings with evidence and logical inference. The answers are important because the same forces are driving your organization.

It affects an organization's marketing, and the organization has some control over it. With an extranet, marketers can help influence it. But first you must understand it.

Can you use standard microeconomic analyses? Is electronic commerce an entirely new marketplace that needs entirely new analytical tools? As marketers, you need answers to these questions before you can formulate economic concepts and models. The models will, in turn, help you formulate business strategies and evaluate policy options.

 

Production, R&D, accounting, sales. Whatever you call them, all of the departments within an organization must work in harmony for the organization to be successful. In a marketing-driven organization, the marketing department shapes the strategic direction of the company, and all departments must work to subordinate individual departmental goals for the good of the customer. An attractive and accessible marketing information systemis thus the organization's lifeblood. Careful attention to the organization's intranet can help the marketing department drive the organization and orchestrate the harmony.

The only factors the marketer can truly control, this "marketing mix" must work in harmony for the product or service to succeed. For marketers, the Internet can be part, even a large part, of that mix and can include distribution. Recent developments in e-commerce are driven by marketers. Some currently hot issues: pricing, advertising, payment systems. digital currency.

The target, the juiciest, sweetest part of the orange is where we want to end up after peeling away the layers of understanding about the macro- and micro-environments, the internal organization, and the marketing mix. The target customers are the focus of all our analysis, and offering products / services desired by the target customers is the ultimate goal of the marketing-driven organization. For marketers, the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for customer service and branding.

What's the common denominator?

Enough valid, reliable information

juice from the orange

If you can remember a word or phrase but not what page it's on, here's a form to try searching the course web, that is, only pages at toLearn.net/marketing/. The results display below, making a very long page.

another view of the orange

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last update: July 22, 2000
http://toLearn.net/marketing/peel1.htm