Upon completion of this chapter, students should be able to:

• describe the functional or perceived environment and understand levels of environment.
• distinguish between aspects of the social and physical environments; also understand the marketing implications of the two environments.
• distinguish between macro and micro social environment.
• recognize and understand hierarchical relationships of various levels of the social environment–culture, subculture, social class, reference groups, and family.
• discuss three factors of the nonspatial environment: time, weather, and lighting.
• recognize that the four major strategic elements in the marketing mix–product, promotion, price, and place factors–are stimuli in the physical and social environment that can affect consumers’ affect, cognitions and behaviors.
• define a situation and describe its relationship with the environmental factors, behaviors, and affect and cognition.
• describe five different consumer situations–information, shopping, purchase, consumption and disposition situations–and identify the key behaviors in each.