Marketing 101

By Kristin Laird

Remember your dreary old textbooks in university? What if they actually looked more like Vogue and came with MP3 downloads? That's the idea behind MKTG, a marketing textbook disguised as a magazine, produced by Thomson Higher Education. The Stamford, Conn. company enlisted students to create the new format. The result: educational eye candy. The slimmer, glossier format-it's 350 pages versus 700 for the original textbook, but retains 90% of the content-also comes with online and cellphone quizzes. "The idea was to re-evaluate where we were as a content provider, not just as a textbook publisher," says publisher Neil Marquardt.

While traditional texts are printed on a two- or three-year cycle, MKTG will be printed annually with up-to-date marketing examples. It has a retail price of US$49.95. The textbook/magazine can now be found in the backpacks of Penn State and University of California students. And with those MP3 downloads, we may see students walking to the beat of Chapter 14: "Integrated Marketing Communications."

This article appeared in Marketing Magazine the week of May 14, 2007.