Environmental Factors

Anheuser-Busch originated back to the Bavarian brewery which was established in 1852. Eberhard Anheuser obtained the Bavarian brewery in 1860 and renamed it E. Anheuser & Co. Four years later, his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, united with the company to create what is known today as Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch is the world's leading brewer in beer producing two of the world's most infamous beers, Budweiser and Bud Light. More so, Anheuser-Busch operates 12 breweries in the United States and is 2 breweries internationally, thus allowing shipments for distribution to its wholesalers, independent wholesalers, and overseas. (Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. 2007).

As the leader in the beer industry producing more than 60 different beers and holding selling rights too many other popular beers, Anheuser-Busch has reached the opportunity to sell domestically and globally. This paper will discuss the high-level domestic and global environmental factors that may impact Anheuser-Busch's marketing decisions, explain how technology impacts Anheuser-Busch's marketing decisions, and analyze the importance of social responsibility and ethics as related to Anheuser-Busch's organization's marketing.

Global Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as "A marketing strategy that consciously addresses global customers, markets, and competition in formulating a business strategy. Whereas, Domestic Marketing is defined by Wikipedia as "A company marketing only within its national boundaries only has to consider domestic competition. Even if that competition includes companies from foreign markets, it still only has to focus on the competition that exists in its home market. Products and services are developed for customers in the home market without thought of how the product or service could be used in other markets.

Domestic and global environmental factors

Several environmental factors can affect or impede domestic and international business for Anheuser-Busch. These factors are:

* Economic Environment: In order for Anheuser-Busch to be a domestic and global organization, monitoring important aspects of other countries is vital for proper distribution of products and services. These factors are the economic trends (GDP), inflation rates, interest rates, money supply, unemployment levels, disposable income, and the industrial structure.

* Political-Legal Environment: Anheuser-Busch will need to consider each countries political-legal environments that it forms partners with. There should be four factors to consider: attitudes towards buying internationally, government bureaucracy, political stability, and monetary regulations.

* Cultural Environment: Anheuser-Busch must research each international market it enters to understand fully the culture, business behavior, lifestyle changes, norms, taboos, age distribution of population, need for products or services, and life expectancies.

Technology impacts Anheuser-Busch's marketing decisions

The success of Anheuser-Busch is focused on its primary business views of product, technology, marketing, logistics, and information resource management.

Anheuser-Busch implements modern technologies such as SAP, Internet, electronic commerce, Oracle, Unix, mainframe, Business 2 Business, and client/server to aid in its success Anheuser-Busch strives to be the leader in the beer industry and remains strong with this intent. The focus on production and shipping has gained Anheuser-Busch an edge of over 50% market share. In addition, Anheuser-Busch is pursuing global expansion with the same dedication, focus and intensity that has achieved its reputation and made Anheuser-Busch the leading U.S. brewer for more than 45 years.

Through data mining, also referred to as Bud-Net, Anheuser-Busch has been able to see trends in consumer spending, demographics, track inventory levels, communicate with other wholesalers, and network with customers throughout the world. Bud Net has also allowed users to download and print inventory receipts, submit end of month inventories, order Point of Sale and repackaging materials. As a daily user of Bud Net, I was extremely satisfied with the capabilities and resources I had to complete the daily inventory process and other necessary functions to complete my tasks.

Importance of social responsibility and ethics related to Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch maintains its unwavering commitment to truth, and objectivity in their relationships with business partners and to their entire customers. This is demonstrated by the code of ethics Anheuser-Busch lives by. To implement the code of ethics, it starts with the employees at Anheuser-Busch, Inc. Each director, officer, and employee has a duty to the company to act with integrity. Integrity requires, being honest and ethical among other things. This includes the ethical handling of any and all conflicts of interest between any personal and professional relationships. A conflict of interest also may arise when any employee, or a member of his or her immediate family, receives improper personal benefit as a result of his or her position within the company.