The procedure

1. The moderator opens the meeting.

2. The participants in turn take the floor and make their reports, expressing their views.

3. The moderator organizes the exchange of views and opinions.

4. The moderator organizes the voting to decide which decision to make.

5. The moderator closes the meeting.

UNIT 4

Marketing and Marketing Techniques

I. Introduction to the Topic

1. Discuss the questions related to the problem of the text on the opposite page:

1. Is a good quality or an acceptable price enough to guarantee good sales of a product? If not, what else should be done to stimulate customer's demand?

2. What marketing techniques do you know? Are they influential? Why? / Why not?

II. Topical Focus

Read the following text. Focus on the boldfaced words. Try to understand their meaning from the context.

Text 1

Marketing

Marketing is the sum of activities involved in directing the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers.

Marketing’s principal function is to promote and facilitate exchange. Through marketing, individuals and groups obtain what they need and want by exchanging products and services with other parties. Such a process can occur only when there are at least two parties, each of whom has something to offer. In addition, exchange cannot occur unless the parties are able to communicate about and to deliver what they offer. Marketing is not a coercive process: all parties must be free to accept or reject what others are offering. So defined, marketing is distinguished from other modes of obtaining desired goods, such as through self-production, begging, theft, or force.

Marketing is not confined to any particular type of economy, because goods must be exchanged and therefore marketed in all economies and societies except perhaps in the most primitive. Furthermore, marketing is not a function that is limited to profit-oriented business; even such institutions as hospitals, schools, and museums engage in some forms of marketing. Within the broad scope of marketing, merchandising is concerned more specifically with promoting the sale of goods and services to consumers (i.e., retailing) and hence is more characteristic of free-market economies.

Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research..

In the early 1960s, Professor Neil Borden identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a “Marketing Mix ”. Professor E. Jerome McCarthy, early 1960 suggested the Marketing Mix containing 4 elements and known as “4 P's”: product, price, place and promotion.

· The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.

· Pricing refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts.

· Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point-of-sale placement or retailing. This third P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or service is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.

· Promotion includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding.

There are distinct stages in converting strangers to customers that govern the communication medium that should be used.

· Advertising is a paid form of public presentation and expressive promotion of ideas aimed at masses. The main objectives of advertising are to maintain demand for well-known goods, to introduce new and unknown goods and to increase demand for well-known goods, products or services.

· Branding means creating reference of certain products in mind. A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes products and services from competitive offerings. A brand represents the consumers' experience with an organization, product, or service.

· Personal sales are oral presentations given by a salesman who approaches individuals or a group of potential customers. They pre-suppose live, interactive relationship, personal interest, attention and response.

· Sales promotions are short-term incentives to encourage buying of products: an example is coupons or a sale. People are given an incentive to buy, but this does guarantee that the customer is going to buy the customer's product in the future.

· Marketing Public Relations (MPR) stimulate demand through press release giving a favourable report to a product and secure a higher degree of credibility and, as a result, boost enterprise's image.

Sources:

http://www.wikipedia.org,http://www.britannica.com.