Using Marketing Visuals for Product Talk in Business English Classes

What is it about?

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES a methodological area of business English teaching recently being developed in the Japanese corporate con-text. One requirement often stressed by my Japanese business English students in sales and marketing positions is the need to talk about the product,or make presentations, in terms of its market growth and market share over time with the use of a visual representation. Such talk is quite complex in that it requires the trainer to focus on the historical aspect of the product, perhaps also comparing it to others, and finally to assess its future prospects. In brief, these requests have linguistic and conceptual elements that demand a lot from the standard business English textbook. What is lacking in many textbooks are effective“visual organizers” (Kang, 2004) that represent the product in these varied terms. In reaction to this, I have been supplementing textbooks with a sequence of real-world marketing visuals: the graphical Product Life Cycles (PLCs), illustrating the historical development of the product relative to its market share; the Boston Consulting Group’s marketing matrix (Kotler & Armstrong, 2002), representing the product’s present market growth and market share; and finally Ansoff’s matrix(1965), speculating on product and market growth strategies in the future.

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Why is it important?

The necessity of making ESP/Business English lessons relevant to learner needs is highlighted in this study. With the increasing demand for ESP curricula to become authentic, teachers need to include content into their syllabi which is directly applicable to real-world scenarios. Visuals represent this authentic link and, instead of being language-heavy, they scaffold content in ways that those who are not so high in language proficiency can easily relate to.

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