Ingles Products And Brands

Products and Brands

A) Word combinations with ´product´

Catalogue (BrE)

Catalog (AmE) a company´s products, as a group

mix

portfolio

line a company´s products of a particular type

product range

lifecycle the stages in the life of a product, and the number of people who buy it at each stage

positioning how a company would like a product to be seen in relation to its other products, or to competing products

placement when a company pays for its products to be seen in films and TV programmes

See Units 15 and 16 for verbs used to talk about products.

B) Goods

Goods can refer to the materials and components used to make products, or the products that are made.

Here are some examples of these different types of goods:

Consumer goods that last a long time, such as cars and washing machines, are consumer durables.

Consumer goods such as food products that sell quickly are fast – moving consumer goods, or FMCG.

C) Brands and branding

A brand is a name a company gives to its products so they can be easily recognized.

This may be the name of the company itself: the make of the product. For products like cars, you refer to the make and model, the particular type of car, example, the Ford (make) Ka (model).

Brand awareness or brand recognition is how much people recognize a brand. The ideas people have about a brand is its brand image. Many companies have a brand manager.

Branding is creating brands and keeping them in customer´s minds through advertising, packaging, etc. A brand and should have a clear brand identity so that people think of it a particular way in relation to other brands.

A product with the retailer´s own name on it is an own-brand product (BrE) or own-label product (AmE).

Products that are not branded, those that do not have a brand name, are generic products or generics.

Price

A) Pricing

Our goods are low-priced. permanently low pricing means charge low prices all the time.

You mean cheap : your goods are poor quality. Our goods are high-priced, but we give customer service. And a lot of our goods are mid-priced: not cheap and not expensive.

Your goods are expensive. Customers don´t need service.

Our must be selling some goods cost (what you pay for them).

Yes. We have loss leaders-cheap items to attract customers in. But it´s all below the ´official´ list price or recommended retail price. We have a policy of discounting, selling at a discount to the list price.

B) Word combinations with ´price´

Boom a good period for sellers, when prices are rising quickly

Controls government efforts to limit price increases

Cut a reduction in price

Hike an increase in price

War when competing companies reduce prices in response to each other

Leader a company that is first to reduce or increase prices

Tag label attached to goods, showing the price; also means ´price´

C) Upmarket and downmarket

Products, for example skis, exist in different models. Some are basic, some more sophisticated.

The cheapest skis are low-end or bottom-end. The most expensive ones are high-end or top-end products, designed for experienced users (or people with a lot of money!). The cheapest entry-level skis are for beginners who have never bought skis before. Those in between are mid-range. If you buy sophisticated skis to replace basic ones, you trade up and move upmarket. If you buy cheaper skis after buying more expensive ones, you trade down and move downmarket.

Downmarket can show disapproval. If a publisher takes a newspaper downmarket, they make it

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