Unit 7C Glossary
BTEC Level 3 Business Studies. Unit 7: Business Decision Making
7Ps - Product, price, place, promotion, people, physical evidence, process
Back data - Data generated in the past that may help making future predictions.
Competitor analysis - The practise of identifying rivals and potential rivals and understanding their strengths and weaknesses
Competitor location - The place or places in which rival businesses conduct their operations.
Consumer reviews - Public reflections customers communicate about their experience with a business and their products.
Economic trends - The overall direction of inflation, balance of payments, interest rates and exchange rates
Focus groups - Gathering a group of people to discuss a brand, its products or other strategies and observing the outcome of that conversation.
Government data - Data collected and communicated by the government such as census data.
Industry reports - Information about trends, product performance and predictions in a specific market that have been communicated in a formal document.
Interview - A face-to-face, telephone or online conversation to gather information from a respondent.
Market trends - The direction in which consumer tastes, interests and preferences are heading.
Marketing plan - Strategies that an organisation plans to use to reach its customers in a profitable way.
Observation - Gathering information about consumer preferences and behaviour by watching how they behave in situations.
People - The staff that interact with customers in the delivery of the service who can have a large impact on customer experience in receiving the service.
Physical environment - The space in which a service in received. This may be a hotel lobby, a branch of a bank or a hairdressing salon.
Place - The ways in which a business gets their product from manufacture to their customers
Price - The amount of money a customer pays for a businesses goods and services.
Pricing strategies - Penetration, skimming, competitor-based, cost-plus, loss leader, psychological.
Primary research - Collection of information first-hand for a specific purpose
Processes - The systems used to support the delivery of a service. Examples include queuing systems and payments systems.
Product - The good or service a business provides to customers in exchange for money.
Promotion - The methods a business uses to communicate with their customers.
Secondary research - Past research which has already been performed and often already published
Segmentation - Dividing up members of a target market into groups that share similar characteristics.
Social trends - Tendencies for people in societies to behave in certain ways.
Target market - Groups of customers with very similar needs to whom the company plans to sell its product.
USP - Any quality or feature of a product that distinguishes it from the competitors. Firms will frequently seek to emphasise this in their marketing.
