develop a marketing strategy how you would conduct environmental scanning and annalysis what is ment by market?

[Tyson]

develop a marketing strategy how you would conduct environmental scanning and annalysis what is ment by marketing concept? What departments of a company does it affect?

Its just a question i wanna know before i go into class or get the jist of it. thankyou for help

[Ritesh Agarwal]

The environmental scanning and analysis is the most required & necessary step before developing any business strategy because it make you aware about current market situations.
there are so many techniques for environmental scanning and analysis like SWOT analysis, PEST analysis etc...

Environmental scanning is the process that seeks information about events and relationships in a firm’s environment, the knowledge of which help top management chart the firm’s future. Environmental scanning entails partitioning the external environment into sectors, namely, cultural, economic, political, technological, and so on. This helps establish a firm’s information needs within those sectors. Data are usually collected by monitoring and forecasting changes in important variables identified in each sector. That data are then transformed into consolidated information, which is integrated into the firm’s strategic planning process (Georgantzas and Acar 1995). Environmental scanning is used to gather information from the environment. These information are used to craft a strategic plan that will help an organization achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. In order to be successful, the organization must align its strategies and plans with the information gathered from the environmental scanning.

SWOT Analysis
SWOT (Strengths and Weaknesses, and Opportunities and Threats) is a basic analytical tool in management that has become popular in recent years. SWOT analysis is often used by strategic planners and top management in developing competitive strategies. It is typically used to decide corporate strategies and to make product or market level analyses (Reddy 1994). SWOT is a widely used thinking framework for identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It enables key factors to be visibly recorded as a high-level summary of a business. SWOT analysis is a summary that is simple but powerful. The technique is commonly used by consultants to document the key factors arising from the review of a particular project or business. The use of SWOT enables an assessment to be made of the overall internal state of a business and the direction in which it is heading, through looking at its Strengths and Weaknesses. It also enables a judgment to be made about aspects of the external business environment, which can affect the performance of the business, through looking at the Opportunities and Threats it faces in the wider world (Elkin 1998). The SWOT analysis on its own is not a strategy. It is merely a tool that helps an organization in making informed decisions. The SWOT analysis is primarily used to identify and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, as well as the opportunities and threats exposed by the information collected of the external environment. The SWOT analysis is a simple yet useful tool in analyzing both the internal and external environments of the organization. SWOT analysis together with other tools such as PEST (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological) analysis can be used as a basis for the analysis of business and environmental factors.