When school starts, when course outlines are available, when we gather the book-lists to acquire our textbooks, we always want to get the textbooks at a lower price with acceptable condition in a short time.
Let’s take a look at the market of textbooks for UBC students. There’s UBC Bookstore, Discount Textbook, iBookUnion, online retailers like Amazon.com, and also personal connections. Different people choose different approaches considering their preferences and word of mouth. Personally, I would check saveonbook.com first, as sellers normally offer a cheap price and there’s a competitive price pressure for them. But for some others, buying online seems a little unreliable and many students just don’t know how to buy textbooks online. In this case, marketing plays an important role for online textbook dealers. Normally, students get to know about those websites from upper year students or friends. Therefore, word of the mouth should be where the online textbook dealers should pay attention to. Enhancing online marketing and getting the students to spread the words seems the right marketing strategy for them.
As students buy textbooks from different alternatives, less and less students line up at UBC Bookstore to get the expensive brand-new textbooks. To draw more students to the Bookstore, I noticed that UBC Bookstore is implementing a new “Rent and Save” strategy this year. For students, some textbooks become useless when the course ends. Thus the “Rent-and-Save” option will be preferred since they save money by paying less and it’s more easier and cheaper returning at the end of the term than doing “buy-back”s. Besides, we cannot be sure if the same textbooks will be used next term, or if they can be resold.
Textbooks are required for university students, and this is definitely a large market book dealers should pay attention to.
2 responses so far ↓
Shalina Bhagat // Jan 23rd 2011 at 4:24 pm
Great first post! How do you suggest online textbook retailers achieve word of mouth for their products amoung students? Your blog posts are a great way to analyze issues such as the one you have identified and give specific marketing tactics and options that the firm may use.
Mengchen (Mimo) Jiang // Jan 27th 2011 at 11:27 pm
Hey Shalina, great to get your feedback! For online textbook retailers, I would suggest them to promote their websites on the forums that students usually go to, and also they can get the customers to spread the word, say, create a link for them to easily click to suggest this website to their friends. Moreover, they can create a facebook page, twitter account and so on about their websites. On top of that, if their products are really good and they provide convenient and reliable services, I believe the word of mouth will be achieved automatically as people will subconsciously recommend this online textbook dealer to their friends.
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