15 Marketing

A What is marketing?

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Marketing is the process of studying and defining the needs of target customers as well as promoting products to fulfil
those needs. For example, if your company produces ice cream, you need to learn as much as you can about consumer
demands and preferences. (What flavours do they like? What size pack do they prefer?)

How do companies find out about their customers?

Companies conduct / carry out market research. They may do this through questionnaires, surveys or focus groups1.
What do companies need to know about their customers? What do companies do with this information?
They want to find out about consumer behaviour and Companies will use the information to make decisions
buying habits – for example, where do they shop and about product development and design. It also helps
what do they buy? They may also want to find out the them to look at market segmentation5 so that they
age and income bracket2 of their customers. This helps can target certain areas of the market or certain types of
them to create a demographic profile3 of a typical consumers. It also helps companies to know what their
customer. Building up a picture of the customer is all part own market share is.
of customer relationship management4 (CRM).

1 a group of potential customers who give their 3 information such as the age, gender and occupation
opinions about a product, brand, packaging etc. of a group of people
2 a section of the population classified according to 4 the strategies that companies use to analyse and
their level of income manage their contact with customers
5 the way the market is divided into different
consumer groups and the differences between them
Tip
A customer is a person who buys a product and a consumer is someone who uses a product – often
it can be the same person, but not always.

B Getting the message across

What makes a successful marketing campaign? What’s the best way to reach
the target audience? Justine Blake, Head of Marketing for a major fashion
retailer, explains more:
‘We use a number of different ways to communicate with our customers. There
are the more traditional channels like TV and billboard advertising, as well as
product placement1. But these days we’re also doing much more guerrilla
marketing2. For example, in one recent campaign we installed special “mirrors”
on bus shelters, that showed people what they would look like wearing some of our latest designs.
‘We have our own in-house marketing team but we also use an advertising agency which
specialises in that type of work. Our brand identity3 is very important and one of our aims is to
build brand awareness4. We want customers to feel confident about the quality of our clothing and
so increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
‘Our latest online campaign featured a video about a young girl and her grandmother going clothes
shopping together. It was a lovely story about having positive role models. It went viral5 and was
shared on social media all over the world! Of course, the more free airtime6 or press coverage7 we
can get, the better. In the fashion world, celebrity endorsement8 can also have a huge impact.
‘Ultimately, we want to engage with our customers9 and bring them the best products we can.’
1 a company pays for their product to be featured in a film 5 become very popular through social media
2 a company promotes their products in an unconventional 6 time featured on e.g. TV, without payment
way, often on a low budget 7 reporting in the press
3 how a business wants to be seen by its customers 8 a famous person is paid to promote a product
4 increase knowledge of a brand among potential customers 9 communicate with customers

34 English Collocations in Use Advanced

 Exercises free airtime
income bracket
brand identity
15.1 Match a word from each box to form collocations. consumer behaviour

marketing free product placement behaviour identity marketing campaign

income consumer brand campaign airtime bracket product placement

15.2 Complete each sentence using a collocation from 15.1.

1 I enjoyed the film, but there was a lot of product placement in it. All the top-brand
cars, phones, watches and so on. It was a bit distracting.
2 We want to build a really strong brand identity as a trustworthy company.
3 One of the aims of our research was to identify certain patterns of consumer behaviour
: specifically where they bought our products and how much they spent.
4 This is a luxury brand, clearly aimed at consumers in the higher income bracket .
5 Our latest marketing campaign was very successful – sales increased by over 20%!
6 The company were really lucky – there was a whole news item on their latest innovation, so they
got a lot of free airtime as a result.
15.3 Complete the collocation forks. Use a dictionary to find one more word to add to each list.
1 loyalty 3 identity
customer satisfaction brand awareness
needs recognition
dictionary.cambridge.org
expectations
2 market segmentation 4 development
share product design
placement

15.4 Look at B. Choose the correct collocation.

1 It’s been 10 years since Kate first set up our in-office / out-of-off ice / in-house marketing team, and
-------------------------------
now we employ 13 marketers working in 3 countries.
2 We want to increase brand understanding
-------------------- / awareness / recognise
--------------among young professionals.
3 Our last campaign went ------------------------
airtime / guerrilla / viral and was shared on social media all over the world.
4 One way to measure customer ----------------------
/ target / brand satisfaction is to put a questionnaire on your
website, and ask questions about how happy people are with your service.
5 We got a lot of --------
public / press / paper
-------- coverage when we gave out free energy monitors as part of
last year’s ‘Energy Week’.
6 The-----------------------------
objective / customer / target audience for our new sportswear range is active parents.
15.5 Read these remarks by different people. Then answer the questions.
Chloe: We want to encourage people to keep buying our products and so we give them
discounts when they spend a certain amount of money.
Thierry: To promote a monster film, we created giant ‘footprints’ on the beach. People loved it!
Clare: If we want to emphasise how healthy the snack bars are, we could get a famous sports
personality to appear in the ads.
Bruno: We invited some potential customers to look at the new packaging and give their feedback.
Veronique: Our market research focused on finding out the age and gender of our customers.
Freddy: We asked people to tell us where they shopped and how often they bought our products.
1 Who wanted to know about the demographic profile of their customers? veronique
2 Whose company used a focus group to do some research? bruno
3 Who is talking about celebrity endorsement? clare
4 Who wanted to know about their customers’ buying habits? freddy
5 Who is talking about customer loyalty? chloe
6 Whose company uses guerrilla marketing? thierry

English Collocations in Use Advanced 35