English for Marketing and Advertising: A Comprehensive Guide
English for Marketing and Advertising
Innovation
Innovation means a new way of doing something. It implies changes in thinking, products, organization, or processes. It’s considered a major driver of business. Innovation is linked to competitive positioning (differentiating your offer and creating value for your customers). However, there are risks and costs involved.
Introducing New Products
Usually, products fail because companies are often enamored of their new product that they fail to do their research or they ignore what the research tells them. Sometimes the pricing or the distribution channels are wrong. Sometimes the advertising doesn’t communicate effectively to entice customers to buy the new product.
Marketing and Advertising Activities
We find two major tasks: the ones done in a company (showing visitors around the company, offering giveaways, presenting at a trade affair…) and the ones that are outsourced (drawing up marketing plans, creating advertisements…).
Market Research
Market research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers using statistics and analytical methods and techniques of applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision-making. It’s a very important component of business strategy, and it provides information to identify market needs, size, and competition. It’s the best way to know what people want, need, and believe.
1. Qualitative Market Research
Qualitative market research is opinion-based, and it can be used to uncover what people think about your product and identify trends. Some methods are:
- Open-ended interviews: Questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. This interview gives a lot of information, but it takes a long time to answer.
- Focus groups: They are led by a professional and formed by groups of 6 to 12 people that discuss questions from specific to general aspects. Usually, focus group sessions last for at least an hour. Since they’re led by a professional, it is a very expensive form of market research.
2. Quantitative Market Research
Quantitative market research involves statistical analysis and mathematics. It should be used whenever you need to identify a numerical output, and it could be appropriate to calculate market sizes.
- Surveys: Take longer to develop but are generally easier to administer than other types of market research.
Collecting Existing Data
- Sales and purchasing statistics (by studying your sales records)
- Geographical statistics
- Panel surveys: A longitudinal study in which variables are measured on the same units over time.
Collecting New Data
Street interviews, postal surveys by mail, email surveys, telephone surveys, feedback forms (forms to know about your company performance), social events, trade journals.
Analyzing the Environment
The environment can be divided into legal, technological, social, and economic environments.
Analyzing the Competition
Steps to follow:
- Positioning of the competition
- The customer profile, prices, supplies
Analyzing the Customer
Who buys, what is attractive about your product for the client, where, when, how do they buy, and what’s our client’s behavior?
Key Concepts
Strategic alignment: To be strategically aligned is when a company fits its internal strategies with the external market conditions, which may be extremely difficult. We have found that 91% of companies are unaligned, so they suffer from “trashing” (lots of work with little productivity gains).
Strategy: The allocation of people, time, and money.
Phases of Market Research
- Market segmentation: Divide the whole target market into subsets of buyers who share common needs.
- Account segmentation: Who will offer the highest revenue in the shortest period of time.
- Buyer segmentation: Understand how group buyers make purchase decisions.
- User segmentation: Understand the market to offer the best answer.
Blackberry is the best example because, in a short period of time, smartphones appeared, and they didn’t remove the keyboard.
The Marketing Plan
Marketing encompasses all the activities a company does to satisfy consumer needs to get a profit. It is a critical business process that is responsible for attracting, retaining, and growing customers. Goods and high-quality products are not sold if there is not a good marketing plan behind the scenes, which makes the product known and desirable. To make a product successful, quality is not enough; we also need to know, for example, when and where the customers need it.
Drawing Up a Marketing Plan
- SWOT analysis
- Fixing objectives and sales projections
- Selecting strategies (focused on the marketing mix)
- Budget
- Follow-up
SWOT: A structured planning method used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving the objective.
Marketing Mix
1. Product
We have to know the features that make the product different and better than the others. There are different products, like consumer, industrial goods, and services. The product portfolio is composed of all the products a company commercializes.
2. Pricing Model
We can find different pricing models: captive product pricing, economy product pricing (cheap as possible), geographical pricing (according to the area that is sold), penetration pricing, freemium (pricing goods at a very low price to encourage people to buy them), premium pricing (keeping prices artificially high to encourage favorable perceptions among buyers).
3. Place
Kinds of stores where the product will be commercialized. Some stores are: outlets, franchises, high-street shops, chain stores, hypermarkets, mail-order, and convenience stores. Distribution: The channels of distribution are broadly divided into three types: producer-customer, producer-retailer-customer, product-wholesaler-retailer.
4. Promotion
The way you reach customers by means of three kinds of agencies: PR agencies, creative agencies, and media agencies.
A PR agency sets the brand name of the product, promotes the brand positioning, drives the press release, creates a webpage, the slogan, the logo, the giveaway, and the socializing acts.
The brand name is the name that identifies the product or the company. There are different brand strategies:
- Corporate brand strategy: Using only one name for all its products.
- Unique brand strategy: Giving a specific brand for each product.
- Private brand strategy: A large distribution buys from a manufacturer in bulk and puts its own name.
The slogan is a memorable phrase used in a commercial context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. Slogans are often used in conjunction with company logos in advertising campaigns. Some tips for a good slogan are:
- Make it memorable.
- Keep it simple.
- Be honest.
- Key benefits.
- Rhythm and rhyme.
The logo is a symbolic mark that conveys origin, identity, or ownership. The main function is to be recognized everywhere. A thought-provoking logo design gives you a psychological advantage over your competition. There are three basic types of logos:
- Iconic/symbolic: Icons are uncomplicated images that are emblematic of a company.
- Logotype/word mark: It incorporates your brand name into a uniquely styled typeface treatment.
- Letterform: You use the main letters of your company.
- Combination marks: You combine an image with the name of the business.
You can organize social events for clients and business partners and assist at trade fairs to search for new clients and meet business partners.
The creative agency has to design the ads, thinking if they will be shown in traditional media or new media. To create an ad, you have to come up with a catchy slogan, find good marketing techniques, and know your customer.
When creating an ad, you have to follow the AIDA model, which consists of:
- Catch the audience’s attention.
- Make the audience interested.
- Create desire.
- State the action.
Advertisements should be in some way sad, surprising, impressive, funny, short, catchy, have a slogan, etc.
The media agency decides where to show the ads.