Ch. 4 - The Marketing Environment

             Be able to understand marketing environment is an important skill for companies to success, especially for companies like Apple. As a global technology company, Apple has to think more about external marketing environment than internal. According to the book, the factors within the external

environment that are important to marketing managers can be classified as social, demographic, economic, technological, political and legal, and competitive. On the other hand, business internal environment is controllable for managers through the creation of the marketing mix. However, external environment is uncontrollable. It keep changing and reshaping by the environment.

            When Apple introduced Ipod it was not a new market, MP3 players had existed for some time without being a big success but customers’ preferences were changing rapidly. After that, Apple quickly saw a new market and created music store, iTunes, which sold millions songs though web. Soon Apple was making big money on Ipod and iTunes. That’s a good and appropriate case for managers to know the importance of understanding external environment of social factors.

            As mentioned before, Apple is a global company, so it requires Apple must have global vision to discover global market. Joining China to WTO creates opportunity as well as threat for Apple.  Lower investment barrier and market barrier gives opportunities for Apple to take advantage of low cost labor as well as getting potential market. On the other side, similar opportunities are also available to competitors.  When competitors move its plant into China and become more efficient, Apple has to respond or will get cost inefficiency disadvantage over competitors.

            In order to gain global market, Apple keep opening its retail store around the world. It opened 33 new brick-and-mortar stores during 2012, 28 of which were outside the U.S., bringing the total number of worldwide Apple Stores to 390. In addition to this, Apple will keep opening up to 35 new retail stores in 2013. For economic consideration, Apple prefers to choose developing countries to expand its business. For example, most recently, the company opened the doors to its largest Asian outlet at the Wangfujing mall in Beijing, China.