The Marketing Book 5th Edition

Product

Firm

Customers

Competitors

Industry structure

Economy

Society

Global socio-economic system

Global physical environment

Increasing sophistication

of strategic challenges

Increasing breadth of

strategic vision

Green marketing 729

practice away from the economic hyperspace it
has evolved in, and bring it back down to earth
and reality.

Reconceputalizing the marketing environment

Companies benefit from a marketing orienta-
tion in many ways, and one of the most
important is the external focus on the market-
ing environment it encourages. However, mar-
keting theory has followed the tradition of
mechanistic economic models, which dismiss
the ecological contexts in which economic

activity occurs (Capra, 1983). So entire books

discussing the marketing environment dedi-

cate chapters to the social, cultural, techno-

logical, economic and political environments,

without discussing the physical environment

which underpins them, and on which they all

depend. At best, the response to increased

environmental concern has been to try to

accommodate it within existing models of the

environment (of the PEST type) by discussing

it as a political pressure, an influence on the

economics of business, a social trend or a

technological challenge. The reality is that the

physical environment is the foundation on

which societies and economies are based. Fig-

ure 28.1 visualizes the marketing environment

Figure 28.1 The physical environment as the foundation of the marketing environment