External Marketing Environment

External Marketing Environment
This is a part of marketing that everybody has to be concerned about. “ The goal in gathering environmental data is to identify future market opportunities and threats” (MKTG Lamb, pg 33 Chp3) . The main points are demographics, economics, and all of the competition.
Since Victoria Springs Vodka is an alcoholic beverage, of course I’m not going to spotlight on the Tweens. That would be illegal and morally wrong. So the people making the purchases are Generation X, and Y, hopefully even some baby boomers. With people under Generation Y, there are strengths and weaknesses present. Since this generation is the most diverse when it comes to the different mixes of races it is more likely that with the right promotion, my product will be consumed by a wide variety of races, instead of just the main ones. Also, people my age are very opinionated and are not afraid to express themselves. So it could be a good or a bad thing, about the word of mouth about your product, i.e. when they tell their friends, have you heard of this, have you tasted this, what you think of it and so on. And now with the use of the internet rising their opinion is able to get out to the masses a lot faster through blogs, myspace, etc. The major one is through twitter, where you can send one message and everybody and their mother wil hear about it.
Generation X and Baby boomers are less likely to buy the product as much, because they focus more on their families and their spending habits go according to their lifestyle. Younger people are more likely to go out to clubs and stuff than older people, and that is usually the main motivation in buying a drink. Older people tend to buy drinks when they have social gatherings or maybe as a niche. But the positive side to that is “ Baby boomers are likely to be vigorous consumers in the future, and even though hidstorically, consumers lock in brand preferances by the age of 40, todays over-50 crowd is just as likely- and in some cases more likely- as younger generations to try different brands within product category. (MKTG Lamb, Hair, McDaniel, pg 36, Chp 3).
On my approach of who I’m targeting I’m using and undifferentiated targeting strategy because everybody who consumes alcohol is a potential target. But usually when it comes to alcohol there ends up being gender segmentation because ads and club promoters etc, focus on women. Statistics do say that women are the major consumers of alcohol, because men tend to buy more beer.