For the market offering on which your marketing plan or consulting project is based, use Internet and other available secondary resources to conduct macro-level market and industry analyses. Your analyses should include a macro trend analysis encompassing all relevant macro trend categories and should uncover quantitative data that provides evidence of the size and growth rate of the overall market, as well as qualitative data regarding the five forces. You should also identify, if you can, the few critical success factors that apply in your industry Your analyses should meet the following tests:
• The source for each item of data or each trend should be cited, with a reference list at the end.
Trade associations and/or trade magazines should typically be among the citations.
• Your macro trend analysis should cover any of the six macroenvironmental categories that are relevant and should prioritize their importance to your business.
• Your evidence of market size and growth rate should, ideally, indicate market size using multiple measures, such as number of potential customers, aggregate revenue of the market, and aggregate units of the good or service consumed by the market.
• Your five forces analysis should draw evidence-based conclusions as to the favorability of each of the five forces and of the overall attractiveness of your industry.
• You should draw a summary conclusion about the attractiveness of the overall market and the industry at the macro level.
• Critical success factors should be just a few and might be inferred from trade magazine articles for the industry in question.