Curso de Inglés Comercial y de Negocios

“Marketing is the process of planning and executing the pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals."

American Marketing Association

Before you read about marketing, match the following marketing vocabulary with their definitions. Follow the example.

Collecting information from the consumer.
Using the internet to market a product.
Keeping and expanding relationships with existing customers.
Marketing that concentrates more on the product than on the customer.
A particular section of the market.
When products and services are developed to meet the particular needs of consumers.
Training and managing inside a company in order to make a positive impact on the customer.

Choose the best description for each word.

Product

Pricing

Promotion

Placement
(or distribution)

Refers to how the product gets to the customer.

This means setting a price for a product, including discounts.

The product management aspect of marketing deals with the specifications of the product or service, and how it relates to the needs and wants of the customer.

This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.

Now read the text and check your answers.

Before the 1970’s, many companies were product-focused. They employed teams of salesmen and women to push products onto the market, even if there was no demand or desire for them.

Companies began to realise that it makes more sense to find out what customers need and want, and then create the product. This is called a market-focus or customer-focus approach.

Two important marketing terms are are acquisition and base management. Acquisition means getting new customers, and base management is keeping and expanding the relationships you already have with existing customers.

A relatively new marketing concept is internal marketing. This is the way that company employees are trained and managed so that the brand makes a positive impact on the customer.

A brand is all the information connected with a product or service. It’s the name, the logo and other visual elements such as image, colours, fonts, symbols etc. It also includes the expectations people associate with the product or service.

Modern marketing methods are influenced by many of the social sciences, in particular psychology, economics and sociology. Market research (or consumer research) is a form of business research which collects information from the consumer. It involves finding out the customer’s (or potential customer’s) preferences, buying habits, opinions and behaviour.

Marketing is generally accepted to simply mean the promotion of products through advertising and branding. In the marketing profession, it is generally accepted that marketing is customer centred and that products and services are often developed to meet the needs of specific groups of consumers, or the target market. To reach the target market, you need a good marketing mix. A marketing mix is often understood as a combination of the Four P’s:

Product: The product management aspect of marketing deals with the specifications of the product or service, and how it relates to the needs and wants of the customer.

Price: This means setting a price for a product, including discounts.

Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.

Placement (or distribution): Refers to how the product gets to the customer.

The Four P’s can be used to create a marketing plan which gives details of the necessary actions in order to achieve a marketing objective. A marketing plan can be for one year, an annual marketing plan, or up to five years.

For a marketing plan to be successful, the mix of the four "p's" must reflect the needs and desires of the consumers in the target market. Trying to convince a market segment, or particular group of the market, to buy something they don't want is extremely expensive and usually unsuccessful. Marketers depend on marketing research to find out what consumers want and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

A relatively new form of marketing uses the Internet and is called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing or online marketing. It typically tries to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing.

Read and listen to the text repeat the expressions in bold.