VI. Work as one group. Discuss the following questions

1. Who deals with market research in your association (firm)?

2. In what way do they obtain the information needed?

3. Who is responsible for marketing research in your association?

4. What organizations can help obtain information on marketing in our country?

5. How do the results of marketing research tell on the production of your factory?

6. Does your association deal with advertising of your products itself or do you employ an advertising agent?

7. What do you consider the best choice of media for advertising your goods?

VII. Work in several groups. Sum up the information you have received from the Unit 3.2. Unit 3.3. Investment in Marketing

Pre-reading task

Read the text, make a brief outline

Text 1 From Investment Boom to Bust

America's productivity gains have been fuelled by a splurge in spending on information technology. What happens if that investment suddenly stops?

Firms in America have spent like no tomorrow on snazzy computers and communications equipment. Indeed, in the past five years, investment in information technology has increased by an annual average of around 25% in real terms, accounting for no less than one-quarter of the country's total GDP growth. The recent profit warnings from high-tech firms are therefore rather alarming: their sales so far this year are well below expectations. Is the IT boom turning to bust?

This question is important, for two reasons. First, a severe slump in investment could turn a mild economic downturn into a deeper recession. Second, a fall in IT investment would dampen longer-term productivity growth. Total business investment has risen to a record level as a share of GDP. If the pace of IT investment now proves unsustainable, productivity growth will fall.

Business investment usually falls in a downturn, but this time the risks are greater. A growing number of economists think that the tech bubble that is now popping, along with firms' own inflated expectations about future returns, encouraged excessive investment. As profits fair and tech shares slide, IT budgets are likely to be slashed.

Japan enjoyed an investment boom in the 1980s. Japanese firms' investment rose from 13% of GDP in the early 1980s to more than 19% by 1990 - a similar-sized increase to that in America, where business investment has jumped from 9% of GDP to 15% over the past decade. The current conventional wisdom is that Japan's investment was a near-total waste; and that, unlike that in the United States today, it did not yield an increase in productivity growth. After its bubble burst at the start of the 1990s, Japanese business investment collapsed and productivity growth stalled.

One reason why investment in America is unlikely to fall so sharply as in Japan is the different composition of its capital spending. IT equipment has a shorter life than buildings or industrial machinery. A faster rate of depreciation means that to achieve a given reduction in a firm's capital stock, gross investment needs to fall by less. It means that the short-term impact on the economy of a decline in investment is more severe. But any adjustment to the desired size of capital stock may be swifter, so reducing the risk of a prolonged, Japanese-style downturn.

The risk of an IT investment bust is now rising. Profits are shrinking, credit conditions have tightened. In recent years America's capital stock has leapt in relation to GDP. If firms decided to reduce IT spending by enough to slow the growth in the ratio of the IT stock to GDP back to its average pace of the past decade - i.e., still allowing for the capital-deepening process to continue - this would imply an 8% fall in nominal IT spending. What does this mean for productivity? Economists have also estimated that if real growth in IT spending falls to zero in nominal terms, then this would reduce productivity growth by three-quarters of a percentage point compared with where it would otherwise have been. However, a downturn in investment has long-lasting effects on productivity growth.