[BLANK AUDIO] Hello, let me introduce to you the idea of an environmental analysis. Like competitor analysis, environmental analysis is a core analysis in any analysis of strategy, that you might compete. Like competitor analysis, environmental analysis helps you understand the broader competitive environment. However, the distinction here is that environmental analysis's focuses more on trends that are impacting the industry. It might speak to, where is consumer demand going, within a particular sector. Maybe it speaks to, what is the potential for some disruptive technology, or change in government regulation. Now there are many different types of environmental analyses, that are sometimes referred to as environmental scans. What I have provided for you here, are just six simple categories to think about when doing an environmental analysis, or an environmental scan. So let's start first with demographic trends. This refers to, for example, what's happening in the population. Do you have an aging population, and how does that maybe affect demand within your industry segment. Second, we wanna think about social cultural influences. What are some of the trends in fashion that might be influencing the industry? If we're thinking about technology, the rise of social media, and the willingness of people to share intimate details about their life online, in various networks. How does that influence the industry and the sector? Third, of course, we wanna think about technological developments. What new technologies are coming about? How are they impacting this sector and this business? Fourth, macroeconomic impacts. Is this an industry that is impacted greatly by the business cycle? Where is the business cycle right now? Are we in a growth phase, or are we in a contraction phase? Once again, how does that affect demand, and ultimately affect competition, within the industry. Fifth, political legal pressures. Many industries are greatly influenced by regulation, by laws. Where are those laws today, how might they be changed in the future, and how does that then, ultimately, impact competition? Last but not least, in this day and age, we want to have our eyes out for trends in global trade, globalization, global issues in general, and how those might impact competition moving forward. Perhaps we're operating in a business that today is rather regionally located, but we need to be concerned about global entry from other competitors, in the near future. Maybe there are changes in trade agreements or trade restrictions, that are gonna impact the industry. We need to have our mind on those. So at the end of the day, environmental analysis is a way for us to fire in our brain different topics that we need to be thinking through. And typically, what people do in environmental analysis, they'll simply have kinda bullet pointed lists, for each of these six categories. Again, to start to paint a picture of the competitive environment that they're operating in.