Marketing to the Campus Crowd : Everything You Need to Know to Capture the $200 Billion College Market

Rating:
Summary: Heard it on NPR
Review: After hearing this book being discussed in-depth on NPR, I thought it could be invaluable for me at work. The college market is very important for my company, and it's hard to know where they (today's college students) stand one week to the next. The stats were really helpful for a presentation I had to give to my boss and my team - made it alot easier to substantiate my recommendations. It's a quick read, I especially liked the case studies and "strategic insights" sections of the book. The table of contents made it easy to skip around to what I needed/wanted to read. Definitely a book I'm going to be keeping on my shelf at work - my department has already put an order in so all my peers and direct reports can get up-to-speed.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent advice!!
Review: The cover of this book caught my eye in the bookstore-trying to figure out how to market to kids in college seems tough, they have their own set of everything from music to food to even language. Morrison takes the guesswork out of this group and his advice can really help an business-owner to add strategies to their marketing to get in on this group of spenders. Kudos to Morrison for a great book... There is an incredible set of credentials on the back cover, he seems to be THE expert in this niche!

Rating:
Summary: Poor Book, Lacks examples, tired of weak business books
Review: This book caught me with the title. I currently operate two businesses on college campuses so I was interested when I saw a book directed towards the college crowd. The college market is an incredible market that few books focus on.
If you had no idea the college market has a lot of money, is large, and likes to spend money, then have no fear...because the first 100 pages of this book try to get that point across. With boring stats and obvious points, the reader must trudge through the first 100 pages to get where one would think the "meat" of the book is.
Once you finally get by this point, the actual "marketing" part of the book begins. The author describes the methods of marketing on a college campus with little substance. This book really would be different if the author actually backed up the examples he writes about. Every example in this book is described as great by the author, but there are absolutely no statistics provided on whether or not the campaigns actually worked! What good is an example if we have no idea if it worked? The "gold" example of marketing in this book is ecampus.com. The business spent TWENTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS on marketing to college campuses and this was the "gold medal" winner? By the end of the book it's really clear that this book is only directed to large companies --- who I hope know enough about the college campus that they won't have to read this book. Small businesses please stay away from this book --- it offers NOTHING to you.

I would take time to go further but it's annoying to me that business books like this keep getting published. My advice, stay away.

Rating:
Summary: Grasping the College Market
Review: This book is a definite recommendation. It's an extremely easy and fun read with timely anecdotes and a plethora of industry do's and don'ts. Anyone looking to get a better grasp of this growing potent market should read this book!