ABSTRACT
The changing business environment (or the emergence of the new marketing reality)
If there is a single issue or theme that now links all types and sizes of organization, it is that
of the far faster pace of environmental change and the consequently greater degree of
environmental uncertainty than was typically the case even a few years ago. This change and
uncertainty has been manifested in a wide variety of ways, and has led to a series of
environmental pressures and challenges with which managers need to come to terms: a
number of these are illustrated in Figure 8.1. Although the fourteen points identified in Figure
8.1 are not intended as either a complete or a definitive list of the sorts of challenges that
managers now face, they go some way towards illustrating the nature of the ways in which
organizational environments are changing and how the pressures upon managers are
increasing. They also illustrate the point made in Chapter 1 that strategic marketing planning
is an essentially iterative process. It is iterative for a number of reasons, the most significant of
which being that, as the company’s external environment changes, so opportunities and
threats emerge and disappear only to re-emerge perhaps in a modified form at a later stage.
