Using Marketing Visuals for Product Talk in Business English Classes‪.‬

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES a methodological area of business English teaching recently being developed in the Japanese corporate context. 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. RATIONALE