I’ll be teaching multiple sections of a marketing principles course in the winter and spring, and will give the MKTG text by Lamb, Hair, and McDaniel a serious look. The anecdotal feedback is that this book has carved out significant share in a short time. Certainly Thomson ratcheted up the marketing machine when they launched this book. The usual MO is for the publisher to send an email announcing the new text; with MKTG I received what seems like 3 or 4 postcards, a marketing mock-up of the text with some excerpts, and a strong personal selling effort.
The text itself is certainly a departure: 15-page chapters; glossy paper (the book resembles a magazine in this respect); $50 price tag; perforated tear-out instructor chapter notes, etc. Several of my colleagues have used or are using the text now, and their initial feedback is largely positive.
Is this disruptive? Yes and no, I guess. Like many of the innovations cited by Christiansen, Utterback et al, the price alone might qualify it as innovative, especially in light of the increasing negative publicity textbook prices seem to be generating. (See this recent op-ed piece, Course Requirement: Extortion, by Michael Granof in the New York Times.)
Most disruptive innovations, by definition however, usually come with a trade-off: low price usually means less robust. Is there a similar trade-off here, or is this just another example of how the net and digitization of content—and I believe that Thomson has migrated much of what is taken out of MKTG onto its web site—have changed the basic business model?
The fact that instructors choose texts for students to purchase suggests that sales figures and market share metrics alone might not answer the question. The proof of the innovation in this case lies more with student usage, a more difficult metric to gauge. Will more students actually read MKTG? With the componentization of content, and the proliferation of video, podcasts, and all manner of electronic media substituting for text, how important is the choice of a particular textbook to classroom learning?
October 10, 2007 at 3:23 am
This is my text for BA 311-Marketing Management at Portland State University. Our instructor teaches directly from the provided PowerPoints. With this sort of format, the publishers should go one step further and include advertising. It would reduce the cost to students and give the writers the needed justification for updating new editions. The magazine layout takes some getting use to and since it looks like last months Vanity Fair, it’s all I can do to keep from throwing it away.