b	ooks we recommend

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education,
Kirp, David L., Harvard University Press, November 2003
How can you turn an English department into a revenue centre? How do you grade students if they are “customers” you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university’s research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today - the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university’s success.
With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University’s philosophy department and the University of Virginia’s business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities “brand” themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution’s visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. He issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?

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How to Become a Marketing Superstar: Unexpected Rules That Ring the Cash Register,
Jeffrey J. Fox, Hyperion, May 2003
With this book the author has turned his contrarian eye to marketing through brand building and innovation and his advice has been delivered in snappy, to-the-point chapters that zero in on his creative and often counterintuitive advice and features such unforgettable fundamentals as: Make a big splash, instead of a lot of little ripples; Always have a pipeline to the president; Own a market, not a mill; The long and short definitions of marketing. There are also provocative “Instant Marketing Superstar” challenges throughout the book, offering the reader a chance to solve real business problems. In a time of corporate budget cuts, it’s more important than ever for all employees to be creative marketers.
The book contains 50-odd short chapters boasting a surprising amount of useful information delivered in a street-smart style. In the chapter entitled “Banish All Buying Barriers,” Fox advises readers to eliminate anything that makes it difficult for customers to buy. Fox lists words to avoid in advertising (e.g., “lifetime” and “quality”) and questions to ask when drafting a marketing plan. Throughout, Fox never loses sight of what he sees as marketing’s ultimate goal, the “Super marketer’s anthem: It does not mean a thing if it does not go ka-ching!”
© 2003 Reed Business Information.

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