Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on English collocations for discussing marketing activities.
Great marketing is at the heart of business success. This was just as true 100 years ago as it is today. Of course, the digital age has brought new methods of marketing, but the basic goals of marketing haven’t really changed. I mean, first of all, you want customers to know about your products and services. In the world of marketing, that’s what we call “brand recognition.” But it’s not just about recognition, it’s about making sales, and “capturing market share.”
As you heard, in describing the goals of marketing, I used two expressions that you might be familiar with: “brand recognition” and “to capture market share.” We call these kind of expressions collocations. A collocation is a natural combination of two or more words to talk about a single idea. You might think of collocations as chunks of language. And it’s usually easier, and more natural, to remember these chunks rather than learning individual words.
Every area of business has its own special expressions, or collocations. And learning these collocations will help you not only understand what others are saying, but communicate your own ideas more clearly. In this lesson we’re going to focus on collocations you can use to talk about marketing activities.
In today’s dialog, we’ll listen to a discussion by a marketing team at a home furnishings company. You’ll hear Nathan, who is leading the meeting, as well as Theo and Camille. They are discussing the company’s market research, their goals, and how to measure progress toward those goals. Try to pick out the collocations they use, and we’ll talk about them later in the debrief.
Listening Questions
1. What does Theo say the process of market research has helped them do?
2. What does Camille say the data from research has helped them do?
3. Near the end of the dialog, what does Nathan say they’ve talked about doing?
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