Analysing Market Opportunities

Chodoe Pty Ltd is an organisation manufacturing a range of cereal products throughout Australia. Its biggest seller, Crunch-A-Licious, is a high-energy chocolate cereal marketed at children under the age of 15. The purpose of this essay is to analyse the macro-economic environment surrounding the cereal industry and identify the relative forces and trends that pose both opportunities and threats in the process of successfully marketing its product.
Successful marketing planning initially consists of a clear understanding of the external environment. An analysis of the macro-environment is crucial to the identification of threats and opportunities which may affect the company’s marketing strategy.
The macro-environment consists of the larger societal factors that affect the whole market environment. These factors include demographic, economic, natural, technological, political and cultural forces. To be successful, an organisation must remain flexible and adapt its marketing strategy to the relevant trends and developments in the macro-environment (Kotler, Brown, Burton, Deans & Armstrong   2010).
Demographic Environment
According to Solomon et al (2009, p.222), “demographics are statistics that measure observable aspects of a population including size, age, gender, race, income, education, occupation and family structure.”The identification of demographic trends not only helps marketers to better understand the composition of consumers within each market segment, but helps to identify potential opportunities and threats to the organisation’s marketing plan. Main demographic trends that have been identified include the changing age structure of the population, changing family structures, geographic shifts in the population, better educated consumers and increased ethnic diversity (Kotler et al, 2010).
While all of these trends have the potential to affect Chocdoe Pty Ltd, the issue of significance is the ageing population. Like many developed countries,...