Identifying Market Opportunities and Threats

Many firms use environmental scanning to identify important trends and determine
if they represent present or future market opportunities or threats. As
illustrated in Exhibit 3.2, this procedure consists of identifying relevant factors and
assessing their potential impact on the organization’s markets and marketing
activities. This is simpler to say than do, because many of the potentially
important environmental factors are interrelated and many of them change
constantly.
Skandia, the $7 billion Swedish financial services giant, used an interesting
approach to identify future growth opportunities. The company established a new
unit, Skandia Future Center, and selected 30 diverse people from around the world
to form five Future Teams. Each Future Team consisted of a mix of three
generations (20-somethings to 60-somethings), functional roles, organizational
experiences, and cultural backgrounds. The mission of each Future Team was to
explore one of five major environmental forces (the European insurance market,
demographics, technology, the world economy, and organizations and leadership)
and develop a vision of the future for Skandia. The Future Teams presented their
ideas to a group of 150 executives. The executives then formed 20 small groups to
brainstorm responses to the ideas developed by the Future Teams. The process
produced several innovative ways for Skandia to grow in the future.1
One way to deal with a volatile marketing environment is to use the seven key
marketing perspectives discussed in Chapter Two. As shown in Exhibit 3.1, these
perspectives are at the interface between the controllable marketing circle and the
uncontrollable marketing environment. They thereby provide important orientations
for viewing the marketing environment, assessing market opportunities and
threats, and determining the best marketing responses to the changing environment.
The perspectives work both ways: they guide both a marketer’s outward
evaluation of the environment and inward response to the environment through
marketing decisions.