MARKETING AND THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT
Business does not operate in a vacuum, but within the larger world around it. Perhaps this is most true of all of marketing. A firm can exercise considerable control over its physical plants and facilities, and over the financial assets in its portfolio. It can exert substantial managerial control over its work force, and it can seek flexibility in dealing with its suppliers, or even pursue vertical integration. When it faces its customers, however, it comes face to face with the outside world. It cannot control its customers; it can only seek to persuade and influence them through marketing.
The marketing division thus finds itself dealing with every aspect of the world beyond the plant gates: political, legal, social, and environmental factors; the overall economic climate; cultural and technological considerations, and considerations of business ethics. All of these things not only influence marketing, but may become central to marketing, whether the marketing operation is global or domestic.
The following discussion will consider the political, legal, and cultural considerations involved in both global and domestic marketing. The legal and political dimensions are obviously closely related, since the law is shaped by the political process. Nevertheless they can be distinguished, in that the law is fixed at any given time, and operates by formal rules, whereas political dynamics are ever-shifting. Moreover, the law can impose direct sanctions on firms, or even in some cases impose criminal penalties, such as jail time, on individual executives of a firm. We will first consider the legal environment of marketing.
The most obvious legal factor in marketing is the constraint that the law may place on certain marketing practices. For example, it would be in the interest of recording-industry marketers to pay for radio airplay of their compani
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