From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: On-Line Bookstores Attract Students (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 16:29:52 -0500
On-Line Bookstores Use Marketing and Scholarship Donations to Attract
Students
By VINCENT KIERNAN
With the academic year getting under way, on-line bookstores are jockeying
for the attention -- and the business -- of both students and faculty
members. One on-line seller is promising to donate 5 per cent of some sales
to scholarship funds for students, while other stores are spending millions
on advertising.
VarsityBooks.com (http://www.varsitybooks.com), one of the best known
on-line textbook retailers, announced in August that it would donate 5 per
cent of sales "We're trying to reach college students before they get back
to campus and have a buying opportunity for books," says one on-line
textbook seller.made under certain conditions to student scholarships. In
most cases, the donations will go to Dollars for Scholars, a network of 800
scholarship foundations sponsored by the Citizens' Scholarship Foundation of
America.
To qualify sales for the scholarship donations, a faculty member or
department must provide a link to VarsityBooks.com on an institutional Web
page, such as a course syllabus on line. When a student uses that link to
purchase a textbook, the college or university is credited with the sale.
A faculty member or institution can direct VarsityBooks.com to funnel
donations arising from a particular link to a scholarship fund other than
Dollars for Scholars, such as the institution's own scholarship fund.
However, the money cannot be used for any purposes other than scholarships,
according to Allen Goldberg, head of affiliate relations at
VarsityBooks.com. "We think that's the best use of the revenue share," he
said.
"We'd like to give a little something back to the students who have helped
us be so successful," Mr. Goldberg said. VarsityBooks.com's customers,
however, won't typically benefit from the scholarship funds themselves,
because Dollars for Scholars offers financial support only to students who
have not yet started college.
When that fact was pointed out to him, Mr. Goldberg amended his statement:
"We're giving back to their brothers and sisters," he said.
He added that the company had not limited the dollar value of donations.
"It's an open-ended program," he said. "It is in perpetuity."
Meanwhile, several other on-line booksellers have launched national
advertising campaigns. The Follett Corporation announced that it would spend
$10-million on a campaign for its efollett.com (http://www.efollett.com) Web
site that reprises its "Get Out of Line" slogan, which made its efollett.com
efollett.com's new ad campaign urges students to "Get out of line." debut
late last year. One advertisement features a herd of buffalo in a line, and
another depicts penguins marching in single file.
David Sheehan, president of Tom Reilly Advertising, a company in Evanston,
Ill., that created the campaign, said that the new advertisements were very
similar to those in last year's campaign, on which Follett also spent
$10-million.
The company plans to place advertisements on national television and network
radio stations, and in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Mademoiselle, ESPN,
and YM. "We're trying to reach college students before they get back to
campus and have a buying opportunity for books," Mr. Sheehan said.
Follett, which operates many campus bookstores, is not the only on-line
bookseller whose ads play on students' perceptions of their campus bookstore
as plodding and overpriced. For example, in one radio advertisement for
Bigwords.com (http://bigwords.com), a student hiding behind a shrub ambushes
a campus tour for freshmen by yelling loudly about Bigwords.com and how the
new students should buy their books on line instead of at the bookstore. At
the end, the announcer intones, "Bigwords.com -- we won't rip you off, as
much."
Indeed, advertisements for on-line booksellers often tread a hard-to-discern
line between the edge needed to catch students' attention and poor taste,
which can anger potential customers. A new on-line bookseller, Ecampus.com
(http://ecampus.com), created a stir when it ran television commercials that
portrayed students in what some thought was an unflattering light. Wallace's
College Bookstores, which operates stores on campuses, owns Ecampus.com.
In one of the commercials, a college student belches the alphabet while two
other students look on. "What college student really has time to perfect
their belching alphabet?" complained Emily Hunt, a junior at the University
of Chicago, on a Web site (http://home.uchicago.edu/~ebhunt/) that she
created to criticize the ad. "And worse yet, do the 'adults' out there in
the real world think that we spend our time as such?"
The television ads are part of a $10-million advertising campaign that began
this month, said Doug Alexander, vice-president of strategic planning and
development at Ecampus.com. The company also is advertising on radio, on
campus television networks, in movie theaters, and in print.
"The ads are a fun-loving look at college life using some standard
advertising techniques of exaggeration and humor, and I think that's the way
most people are viewing it," said Mr. Alexander.
Ms. Hunt's Web site includes an e-mail link for sending protest messages to
the company and a flier that can posted on campuses. However,
anti-Ecampus.com fever seems to be building slowly, to put it mildly: An
electronic bulletin board on Ms. Hunt's Web site has attracted few messages
-- and most of those take her, not the bookseller, to task. Says one: "Where
is your darn sense of humor?"
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education