Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

Are your committees truly committees? Are they environments that draw on dynamic discussion and teamwork to resolve tenacious institutional problems? Or are they dominated by a single talker, and undone by the glaze in other members’ eyes as they fidget and not-so-inconspicuously check the time. Are they vibrant fonts of creativity or cesspools of politics, gossip and dissent-for-its-own-sake? Most importantly, are they generating buy-in for new initiatives, or are they simply an academic ritual — a proforma waste of time?

Student hunger on campuses is more prevalent than most people think. Head into a packed student center or campus dining facility, and it is easy to believe that the problem doesn’t exist on your campus, but chances are it does. According to a Students Against Hunger report, more than 45% of the 3,000 students surveyed from community and four-year colleges had experienced food insecurity in the past 30 days.

Finding ways to reach faculty about early adoptions is a perennial concern for college retailers. Faculty are often unaware that timely textbook choices do more than increase efficiency. They ultimately help students save money and receive more for their books at buyback. Because translating the nuances of the textbook industry to faculty in a way they understand is an ongoing challenge, we’ve compiled our top five most-read adoption communication articles from 2017.  Explore what you might have missed or bookmark this page as a reference.

Introducing “Textbook Wisdom,” a Foreword Online series that speaks directly to faculty about the course materials industry and its impact in the classroom. Share it with faculty — and on social media. Bridge the communication gap between bookstores and educators.

Scavenger hunts offer college stores a wealth of opportunity. They bring students through your doors. They offer a fun way to bond with newcomers, while helping them make new friends, get to know the campus and become acquainted with your offerings. What’s the best way to ensure your scavenger hunt is a success? Here, we offer our compendium of scavenger hunt articles. They include tales of successful store events and our Monthly Marketing Plans, which make setting up your scavenger hunt quick and easy.

We share a monthly marketing plan at the beginning of every month designed to increase store traffic and boost student trust and engagement. Included in the plans are posters, flyers, examples social media posts and more so your store has everything it needs for a spectacular event. As you develop your store’s marketing idea for 2018, check out our top five most popular monthly marketing plans in 2017.

T.S. Eliot famously declared that April is the cruelest month, but for most students, February stands out as the year’s gloomy nadir. Those in temperate climes have two more long months of dark, sleety nights before spring arrives. Midterms loom for all. That’s why this month’s marketing plan is devoted to helping you transform your store into a cheerful mid-winter refuge. Plan a February Feud, a riff on the classic gameshow that will brighten the month and offer students the best cure for the blues: Laughter.

Happy holidays from Foreword Online.

Everyone is talking about it. The “Amazon Effect” is scattered across retail news. The most recent companies to feel the impact are Ralph Lauren and J. Crew, but large department stores like Macy’s have been feeling the effect for a while. When Amazon has the seeming ability to line up these large corporations, regardless of what they sell, and systematically watch them fall, what hope does any brick-and-mortar store have?

Geofencing can be used for anything from increasing foot traffic in stores to parents keeping track of their children — even human resource departments can utilize this technology to monitor employees who work in the field or from home. These virtual fences allow marketers to hone their advertising efforts to a selected group of people, often based on various factors of online behaviors, within an established distance from a store’s location using their mobile GPS. An Orwellian advancement in technology to some, but to others, geofencing gives brick-and-mortar businesses a way to compete in a growing eCommerce market.