The marketing environment is the scope of marketing, which can be divided into task environment and macro environment. The task environment is a micro environment that directly interacts and influences marketing. The macro environment is the external environment that indirectly affects marketing. It is not very meaningful to strictly distinguish between the task environment and the macro environment, because various influencing factors are actually intertwined. But in marketing practice, we do need to understand the direct and indirect influencing factors of marketing and set marketing strategies based on the influencing factors. According to Porter’s Five Forces Model, the task environment of marketing mainly involves upstream suppliers, peer competitors, downstream channel merchants and end users in the industrial chain, and of course, friendly companies with potential competitive relationships, as well as companies with potential substitutes. We can simply think of this as the micro marketing environment of the enterprise.
The macro environment can be simply considered as PEST, namely politics, economy, society and technology. Although many people believe that demography, law, culture and ethics all belong to the category of “society”, the cross-border e-commerce field attaches great importance to this. In addition, cross-border e-commerce involves different regions, so geographical factors also need to be considered independently. In recent years, the relationship between man and nature, or man and environmental protection, has also been increasingly valued. These factors are collectively referred to as the ten factors of the macro marketing environment.
Marketing always operates under the above-mentioned micro and macro environments, so the above two environments are collectively referred to as the marketing environment. Both macro and micro factors will affect marketing, and marketing will also affect its environment. That is, marketing itself and the marketing environment constitute a competitive relationship, with both competition and cooperation. For example, if marketing activities destroy nature and constitute an antagonistic competitive relationship with nature, then marketing activities will be resisted. Environmentalists oppose the distribution of leaflets in places where people gather, while Ant Financial’s “Ant Forest” activity has been widely praised. Marketing entities form a complex relationship of both competition and cooperation in the marketing environment, referred to as a competitive relationship.