Hi, I’m Liam. Welcome to Oxford Online English! In this business English lesson, you’ll
learn to talk about marketing strategies and corporate competition. You’ll see lots
of useful vocabulary and collocations you can use to talk about business strategy.
You’ll learn useful language to talk about losing market share, entering
a new market, launching new products, and staying competitive in an evolving market. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us for
this conference call, wherever you might happen to be in the world! If you don’t know, my name’s
Dimitri, and I lead the marketing department. I’m not sure that you’re aware, but our European
business has not been doing well in the last year or so. In particular, we’ve been losing
market share to our rivals. A Korean company, Neidon, entered the European market three
years ago, and have adopted an aggressive pricing strategy, which is putting pressure on
our revenues. Additionally, a German start-up, called Hammer, have expanded their market
share in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, partially at our expense. It’s clear that
we need to respond to these market forces, and I’d like to start thinking about
our options during this meeting. In this presentation, you heard some phrases based
on the word ‘market’. Let’s look at a few of them. Imagine that you want to explain the meaning of
these phrases in English. What would you say? If you’re losing market share, then your
business has a smaller proportion of the available customers. The phrase in
sentence two has the opposite meaning; if you expand your market share, you reach
a higher proportion of potential customers. You can also gain market share,
which has the same meaning. ‘Market forces’ – you can also say ‘market
pressures’ – describes the conditions in a market, and how they affect company
behaviour and strategy. For example, a market in a particular field, or a particular area, might get more or
less competitive with time. Consumers there might get richer or poorer. These are examples of
market forces which businesses need to adapt to. Generally, you can improve your English to
talk about these topics by paying attention to *collocations*. A collocation is when
you use words in a specific combination. ‘Expand your market share’ is a collocation.
You might know all these words individually, but could you use them together? With
collocations, you need to learn the combination of words as a single block, so that
you can use them together without thinking. We recommend going back to the presentation text
and trying to find more useful collocations. Do the same with the other presentation texts
which you’ll see in the rest of this lesson! You’re about to hear the
presentation for part two. Don’t forget to listen out for
collocations. In the presentation, there are three new collocations with the
word ‘market’. Try to find them as you listen! I’d like to discuss an idea which
has been floating around lately, and explain why I don’t think it’s a solution
to our problems. I’m talking about China; I’ve heard from many of you that we should try to
enter the Chinese market, but I don’t think this is a good strategic move for us right now. First
of all, the regulatory barriers to entry are high. Secondly, there’s already fierce competition,
from both local and international companies. Finally, the cost of getting established
in a new market can be large, and while we’re financially solid, we don’t have so much
free cash flow, so we’d have to take on debt. Instead, I think we should focus
on our North American presence, where we’re already in a strong market
position and the competition is less intense. Did you hear the collocations with
the word ‘market’? Here they are. What does ‘getting established’ mean?
‘Established’ means something like ‘stable’ or ‘comfortable’. If you get
established in a new market, you reach a position where your business is
comfortable, and you’re not fighting for survival. There were also several other useful phrases
in the presentation. Let’s look at a few. Can you remember the missing words? Remember
that you can go back and listen to the presentation again if you want!
Here are the answers. ‘Move’ here means something like
‘decision’ or ‘plan’. It’s a noun. If something is a good decision, you can
describe it as a ‘good move’ or a ‘smart move’. If you want to enter a new market, there
will usually be some barriers to entry. These could be regulatory – laws and rules
which it is difficult or expensive to follow. They could be cultural – maybe there isn’t much
demand for your product in some countries or cultures. They could be financial – maybe you need
to invest heavily to start a new operation. If the barriers to entry are high, then it’s especially
difficult to get established in a new market. There are many words which you can
combine with the word ‘competition’. In the presentation, you also
heard ‘intense competition’. Here’s a task: go to a good online
dictionary – we recommend Longman or Lexico – and find three more adjectives which
can collocate with the word ‘competition’. If your English is intermediate level or
higher, focusing on collocations is often a better way to improve your vocabulary, rather than
spending all your time learning individual words. Again, when you listen to the presentation, try
to find new collocations with the word ‘market’. There are three to find. Another way that we might compensate
for the decline in our European business is by bringing new product lines to market, both
in Europe and elsewhere. This could help us to expand our customer base and claw back some of
the market share we’ve lost in recent years. Additionally, to cut down on travel expenses,
we’ve been retraining our sales teams so that they can work remotely. We
started work on this very early, which we hope will give us a competitive edge over
other firms that still rely on face-to-face sales. Overall, our strategic vision for the next
five to ten years is to take a more global, less Europe-centric approach. That doesn’t
mean we’ll be neglecting our European business, but we’ll be focusing more on emerging markets,
and trying to build a dominant position there. Here are the three new collocations with ‘market’. ‘Claw back’ is an interesting verb. Do
you know what it means, or can you guess? ‘Claw back’ means to fight to get
back something which you lost. Now, to practise the other language
you heard, look at some questions. Pause the video, and try to make answers to these
three questions. Make sure your answers are full sentences, and make them as detailed as possible.
Write them down, or say them out loud, or do both! Ready? Could you do it? Of course, there’s more than one way to
answer, but let’s look at some sample answers. You could say: ‘A company can expand its
customer base by launching new products, entering new regional markets, or attracting
new customers through advertising.’ You could say: ‘A company can gain a
competitive edge by having a superior product, having lower prices, or by offering
better customer service and support.’ You could say: ‘In my country,
there’s a restaurant chain called Goody’s that have a dominant
position in the fast food market. It’s one of the few countries where MacDonald’s
haven’t been able to gain much market share.’ If you found it difficult to answer the three
questions yourself, use our answers as templates. Use the sentence structures we used, and
change the details to use your own ideas. Also, just practising your answer once might not be enough! Say your answer out loud
several times, until you can do it fluently. Let’s move on to our last section. As before, try to find new collocations
with the word ‘market’ in the presentation. This time, there are three to find. So far, we’ve focused more on challenges which
we’re currently facing, but there’s plenty of good news, too. In Latin America, we are in a dominant
position, with two of our largest competitors announcing recently that they’re planning to
get out of the market, which is great news for us and should allow us to consolidate our position
further. However, we don’t want to get complacent. We have a first mover advantage in most of
Latin America, but other companies will notice our success and try to move in. One thing I’d
like our product teams to start thinking about is how to keep our pricing competitive and
make it difficult for any new market entrants. We should also be looking at long
term trends in South America, and make strategic decisions that reflect the
changing market conditions across the continent. Did you find the new collocations? Here they are.
In part two, you heard a collocation which means the opposite of ‘get out of
the market’. Do you remember it? The opposite is ‘enter the market’,
as in ‘enter the Chinese market’, ‘enter the Brazilian market’, and so on. Let’s look at some more useful phrases you
heard. Can you remember the missing words here? Can you remember? Pause the video
if you need more time to think. Ready? Here are the answers. If you consolidate something, you
make it stronger and more stable. ‘First mover advantage’ means the benefits you
get from being first to enter a new market, or launch a new product. For some
time, you have no competition, because you were faster than your rivals. ‘Move in’ here has the direct meaning of entering
a new market, but it has a secondary meaning, too: it has the idea of trying to
take market share and customers. That’s all for this lesson, but there’s
a lot of information and vocabulary here. We recommend that you go through the presentations
again and find new words and phrases to learn. Thanks for watching! See you next time!
