Macro Analysis of Telecommunication Industry in Australia

Executive Summary

The telecommunication industry is the most booming industry across the world and in Australia too. It is very important for telecommunication industry to analyse its micro environment and macro environment. Microenvironment consists of the organisation’s various departments, competitors, customers, marketing intermediaries and publics. The microenvironment represents the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation. The organisation has partial control over the factors of its microenvironment.

The macro environment consists of the factors such as demographic, economic, natural, technological, political and cultural environments of the market place. These environments represent opportunities and threats of the organisation and the organisation do not have control over them. This report further discusses about the demographic factors in terms of the ageing population, its geographic shifts, education level and family structure of the population.

Furthermore, the report illustrates the economic environment based upon the difference in income and their spending patterns. Natural factors such as shortage of resources, the increase in the prices, increase in pollution and government’ approach towards wise use of natural resources. Moreover, Technological innovations and their effects on marketing environment are discussed in context. Political factors such as government regulations and policies are briefly discussed next. This report briefly explains the Telecommunications Act 1997 regulating the telecommunication industry.

Finally, the cultural values and beliefs of people are illustrated to explore the effect on their buying behaviour.

1.0 Introduction

There have been substantial changes in Telecommunication industry in Australia in last 20 years. The telecommunication industry is no more the Government monopoly. So there is a very strong competition in telecommunication industry among industry giants such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and 3 Mobile. Technical developments have brought increase in types of services offered, which includes telephone, mobile, internet and data transfer services, pay TV and video conferencing and many more. The Australian telecommunication market is fairly complex because of its characteristics. The important factors to be considered are its geographical size, multi-cultural population, continued government control over Telstra etc (Daly A. E., 2001).

While deciding the marketing strategy, it is very important to consider micro and macro environment factors of the marketing environment. A company’s marketing environment consists of persons and factors outside the marketing activity which may affect the marketing strategies. The marketing environment is made up of two parts: The Microenvironment and The Macro environment.

Microenvironment consists of the forces which help the organisation to serve its customers in a better way. The organisation usually has some control over these factors. Microenvironment consists of various departments of the organisation itself, competitors, marketing intermediaries, customers and publics (Kotler, Brown, Adam, Burton, & Armstrong, 2007, p.163)

The components of the micro environment work in an external environment which forms the opportunities and threats for the organisation or any particular industry. The company needs to consider those forces in its external environment. The macro environment consists of six factors which are listed below.

• Demographic environment

• Economic environment

• Natural environment

• Technological environment

• Political environment

• Cultural environment (Kotler, Brown, Adam, Burton, & Armstrong, 2007, p.163)

2.0 Demographic Environment

The study of Demographic environment consists of human population in terms of age, sex, location, occupation, race and other differences. Demographic environment is very important to design the marketing strategy, because this distinguishes the demands of the customers according to the demographic factors. World’s population is now over 6.4 billion and is expected to be more than 8 billions by 2028. The main growth is in countries like China, India and Brazil. Thus these markets are being very popular for organisations. Australia represents only half a percent of the world’s population with 20.55 million and a rise if 1.2% per annum (Kotler, Brown, Adam, Burton, & Armstrong, 2007, p.167-168).

2.1