Industry Forecasting

Industry Forecasting

Violet Murrill

BUS 620

Dr. Susan Sasisdek

May 19, 2014

Industry Forecasting

Every business needs the marketing managers to devise a marketing mix that will fit the preferences and needs of their customers. If a business has an effective and efficient marketing mix, it will be successful. As in the 2008 thru 2010, the global recession affected the auto industry with declining sales, which the “Big Three” automakers requested emergency loans from the U.S. government, so they could address their cash shortages. In April of 2009, GM and Chrysler were faced with bankruptcy and liquidation. Ford Motor Company was able to sustain without filing for bankruptcy partially due to loans they obtained in 2007. People wondered “how did this happen?” According to Ingrassia (2010), “Detroit’s auto industry was built on a corporate oligopoly and a union monopoly-a combination that had produced decades of astounding success but also sowed seeds of failure. For seventy years the two sides had expended so much effort trying to outwit each other that they had precious little energy left to take care of their customers-or to comprehend the threat of new competitors from beyond America’s shores.” After the automakers crisis, the U.S. and Canadian governments provided GM and Chrysler with financial bailout, which would allow the companies to restructure and get rid of their debt thru Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Both companies would emerge from this bankruptcy as a new company owned by the United States Treasury and United Auto Workers union. They would have to restructure their companies and put together a marketing mix that would include the PESTEL analysis. The PESTEL analysis is an acronym for the six environmental factors that include political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (Finch, 2012).

The auto industry made Detroit the fourth largest city in the U.S., where hillbillies from Appalachia and sharecroppers from the South...