What they are and what the difference is between them.
A company's marketing environment consists of the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management's ability to develop and maintain successful transactions with its target customers. Inside this environment lies two other environments, the microenvironment and the macroenvironment. These two environments together make up the all of the elements present in the marketing environment.
The microenvironment consists of five forces close to the company that affects its ability to serve its customers. The first is the company's internal environment that has several departments and management levels. The second component includes the marketing channel firms that cooperate to create value: the suppliers, the firms, and marketing intermediaries. The third component consists of the five types of markets in which the company can sell: the consumer, producer, reseller, government, and international markets. The fourth component consists of the competitors facing the company. The fifth component consists of all the publics that have an actual or potential interest in or impact on the organization's ability to achieve its objectives.
The macroenvironment is the larger societal forces that consist of six components. The first is the demographic environment which shows a changing age structure in the U.S. population, a changing American family, geographic population shifts, a better-educated and more white-collar population, and increasing ethnic and racial diversity. The second is the economic environment, which shows changing real income and changing consumer spending patterns. The third, natural environment shows the coming shortages of certain raw materials, increased energy costs, increased pollution levels, and increasing government intervention in natural resource management. The technical environment is the fourth and shows rapid technological change, unlimited innovational opportunities, high R&D budgets, concentration on minor improvements rather than major discoveries, and increased regulation of technological change.
