MARKETING TERMINOLOGY

Professor Philip Kotler, the renowned U.S. marketing-guru, once said: “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master”. This statement carries the burden of the multifaceted nature of this area of business, which covers a wide range of activities, involving everything related to providing: the right product, in the right place, at the right price, and at the right time.

Students and practitioners of marketing mainly rely on English texts to guide them through the great variety of topics within this subject. This might be an easy task for English native-speakers, who master the language, but a rather frustrating mission for non-native, in particular Italian students, who not only have to cope with the study of marketing itself, but also need to decode the language. The linguistic barriers in this field are considerably high, mainly because today there are no specialized English-Italian marketing dictionaries available.

This corpus-driven study is conceived as a first step towards the compensation of the lack of linguistic tools for marketers. Starting from the creation of the MRACorpus (Marketing Research Articles Corpus), counting nearly one million tokens, this research provides a comprehensive study of a selection of marketing keywords, in reference to their meaning, context of use, and Italian equivalence, with an insight on the application of these terms in the field of marketing and with the extraction of their collocations, accompanied by suitable Italian translations, in relation to their use in practice. The final result is a specialized English-Italian/Italian-

English glossary encompassing the analyzed terminology.