Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

Buyback is just around the corner, but it isn’t too late to encourage students to sell their textbooks back to your college store. Follow this easy-to-use checklist to make sure you maximize your buyback marketing efforts.

When digital publishing became widely available, the major publishers ignored it. Then eBooks started making headlines, and the industry began to grow at incredible rates. Still, traditional publishers were slow to react. The consensus was that publishers had “five years” to get in front of the issue even though they were already five years behind.

Let’s be real. Marketing isn’t exactly a field known for honesty. In fact, most people associate the work with obfuscation, dissembling and hyperbole. And those are gentle terms. Some folks just say marketing is nice word for lying. As it turns out, research shows young people are increasingly wary of anything that resembles spin — and companies have caught onto that, developing campaigns that illicit trust with unvarnished appeals. Collegiate stores might consider using similar forms of extreme honesty when reaching out to students. Such campaigns often win a surge of long-term, loyal customers.  

Drawing students to your store for buyback is step one. Step two can be even trickier: Ensuring customers leave feeling happy with the cash they get for their books.

Why are meeting agendas important? I volunteer on the board of a local nonprofit organization and recently attended their agenda-free meeting. The meeting started at 7 p.m. and lingered on well past 9 p.m. Little was accomplished, a couple people were especially vocal and kept the meeting squarely off topic, and by the end of it, I couldn’t wait until my term on the board was over. Unfortunately, meetings like this aren’t rare in the business or educational world. However, an effective agenda can turn a meeting that feels like a waste of time into a productive collaboration.  

A toxic employee makes the daily stresses of college retail unbearable. Already, tensions abound with faculty politics, student and family financial concerns — not to mention massive changes in the industry as a whole. These workers create chaos, lower morale and inspire your best employees to quit.

Given the careening cost of higher education, it might be tempting to cut required texts from your syllabus in order to help students save money. If you’ve been teaching a while, you likely have ample resources for giving lectures, assigning homework and conducting assessments. However, if you eliminate the opportunity for students to engage with a text, you eliminate more than an expense. You deprive students of the ability to develop one of our most fundamental skills — reading — in your class.

Memes, GIFs and emojis are the language of Generation Z. Entire conversations can be had without typing a single word, attitudes can be conveyed and understood in seconds, and emotions can be shared without vulnerability. While your college store wants to speak directly to students, it is easy for your message to go astray. That’s why we have created this helpful guide to increase your store’s image fluency.

Every business will eventually receive a complaint. Despite best intentions, a customer will walk away unhappy at one point or another. The customer might reach out to the business itself for a resolution to the problem, but with increasing odds, they are going to take their complaint to social media. Once the negative words are out on the internet, they are there forever. Managers and business owners have two choices: they can ignore the complaint or demonstrate their great customer service for the world to see.

Administrators and academics differ on a host of topics, but, politics aside, you know there are a lot of non-faculty on campus you appreciate. Without the department office manager, you would be stuck laboring over a copy machine more hours than you’d like. Without a well-staffed counseling center, you would have nowhere to send students in need of emotional support. Without advisors, your students would be even more confused about their path to graduation, especially at a large university where the bureaucracy is complex. An official school bookstore textbook manager is an oft-overlooked member of the administration who deserves your appreciation.