The marketing environment

Abstract

Europe has long been a huge economic force, accounting for more than 40 per cent of world trade. However, its own market remained a complex web of internal non-tariff barriers until the Single European Market (SEM) project took shape in the mid-1980s. The effects of the SEM will take time to make their full impact, but it is clear that for many industries the new structure is having radical implications. Industries that were built on nationally regulated frameworks, such as financial services, or those that lived on contracts from their own governments, such as telecommunication, are experiencing enormous change. The national markets for public procurement contracts have, or soon will have, become open competitive markets on a European scale. Companies with strategies based on serving local markets protected by physical and regulatory barriers to trade now have to deal with direct international competition. Start up companies and those with growth objectives can aim for an EU market of almost 350 million people to support marketing strategies based on low-cost and ‘world class’ product quality. European consumers increasingly view the same media, listen to the same music, respond to similar fashion trends and are ever more aware of each others’ consumption behaviour. Europe is in transition — as perhaps it has always been - but especially now with the added pace and urgency of the SEM programme and with the changes in political and social values that lie behind it. In so far as business success relies on well-judged adaptation to a changing environment, the 1990s is a decade in which environmental responsiveness will be vital. In so far as marketing is the mana?gerial function with special responsibility for reading and interpreting the environment, it is also a critical decade for marketing practitioners.