| BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
Can you imagine a football game without the players? Or without the ball? On the other hand can you think of any business operating outside its «field», its environment. There are synonymous activities between businesses and its environment since they influence each other in many ways.
In a few words companies take an outside - inside view of their environment all the time. This is a continuous process in order to monitor the changing environment and keep their strategies up-dated in order to meet the best opportunities offered.
Managers faced with the need to analyse effectively the environment have to deal with a problem. The formulation of a strategy that is concerned with matching the capabilities of an organisation to its environment.
Two are the main parts that need to be analysed each time:
(1) the macroenvironment and
(2) the microenvironment
Some of the forces are «controllable» and that means they can be manipulated from the company and some others are «non controllable» factors which have to accepted as they are.
The major forces that represent the macroenvironment are namely:
demographic
economic
natural
technological
political and
cultural
This is a classification according to Philip Kotler. Another well known is the PEST analysis. Here the environment is analysed with the use of
Political
Economical
Social and
Technical environment
Both approaches can be used effectively, for the purposes of the course we will use the Kotler’s scenario.
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