Marketing Industry : The Largest Bookstore Chain

Considering with the economic downturn, Barnes & Noble has found the way to offer price discount to all its customers specially price seekers. Since Barnes & Noble was a leading bookstore, it attracted many suppliers and publishers. Barnes & Noble was taking advantage of the situation where it had the ability to access a large customer base to arrange a better price deal from publishers and suppliers. Since it had a power of negotiate the price, it would add more value and strength to its business. The company was able to offer up to 30% off on the actual price from the publishers for hardcover bestsellers and 20% for all children books. In addition, Barnes & Noble offered discount program to its members. All members can receive extra 10% additional on top of 30% to hardcover bestsellers only if they agree to pay a $25 membership fee per year.

As of January 2010, Amazon.com has three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples. By offering a large amount of varied categories through its website and other international ones (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.fr, and so on), it has managed to grow to a customer based company with over 30 million people. In addition, the online retail format enables the company to reduce costs of managing inventory (Amazon.com; online bookstore, 2008).

If traditional book sales continue to fall at their present rate of 34% annually we will be out of the traditional books selling in three years. The CD sales are declining at a similar rate.

The book market is in fact growing ‘with the exception of weak fortnights in both March and April, sales figures for the overall book market have shown sustained growth in 2005. ...

In the 2015 annual report, the company stated their multiple distribution centers “enable it to maximize available discounts and enhance its ability to create marketing programs with many of its vendors” (“Barnes & Noble Inc.”, 2015, p.12). That is crucial as Barnes & Noble has around 600 publishers. The company also has extensive marketing capabilities to connect with their customers. They created partnerships with Samsung, the producer of the NOOK, to increase marketing funds and be able to customize emails to consumers (“Barnes & Noble Inc.”, 2015, p.16). Therefore, they are capable of reaching a large audience of book readers and enticing them to purchase more items.

Throughout this past decade Globalization and technology have drastically impacted the sales of Barnes & Noble. In the recent past Barnes and Noble was faced with its biggest challenge it has faced in its history, trying to keep up with Amazon’s fire tablet. This was definitely a new challenge because unlike Barnes and Nobles past competitors such as Borders book store they were now in current competition with a specific product of a company. The Amazon tablet was like nothing consumers had seen before.

Some of the unique aspects of Barnes & Noble’s situation are that the bookseller was once the top competitor bookstore, pushing other small bookstores out of the market. It is currently the only bookstore chain in the nation. Recently with the development of e-readers and e-books Barnes & Noble has struggled to stay afloat. Typically companies can see improvement in business as technology advances but, Barnes & Noble has experienced the opposite effect. The bookstore kept up with the e-book demand and invested in an e-reader, the “Nook”. However because of this exact investment needed to promote the product Barnes & Nobles has incurred losses in 2011. According to the text there is still more profit in printed books that in e-books. “Customers

adding to its monopoly. Many authors are discouraged by this due to the fact that

Based on the amount of press coverage the company is receiving, you might think that the company is rolling in money. In fact, despite the changes I made five years ago, the opposite is true: minimal profits and negative cash flow. I know we need yet another new publishing strategy to succeed in the future: publish fewer books in fewer segments and focus more resources on differentiating those books in the marketplace.

Harry Potter books sold out immediately on multiple discount offers from different bookshop. There was lot of book shops which were selling the book on cheaper and discounted prices. They went on with this offer since a lot of people were coming to buy that book and they will sell it on margin prices, the prices were competitive and the number of copies sold in millions. On the launch of this book the book sellers gave out 40 percent discount, since the author was known and had a lot of fan following. Even the independent book sellers were selling this book with additional services. They didn’t drop down the price for the book but instead gave a few added services to their customers. Books stores usually know the best sellers and they are well familiar with the fan following of the different authors. They devise out a strategy which covers all their expenses and sell the book on a price where they still get away making profit.

In the beginning of each new semester, millions of students across the United State of America forsake their school bookstore and find their way to Amazon.com This hunt for class textbooks at a discounted price has become a part of the student culture in America. This phenomenon that occurs is merely a drop in the ocean of the giant that has become Amazon.com

In September 2004, Wendy Wiley, the Northlake Bookstore manager, was considering the implications of a shocking development. For the first time in her seven years as the Bookstore manager, textbook sales for this fall had decreased from the prior fall sales. The sales decrease was approximately $180,000, or 3% of annual textbook sales. Wendy wanted to address this problem before it got worse. She found that this sales decrease was due to two emerging technology problems, possibly of equal magnitude: 1) the students’ increasing use of online

This has an effect on the increase growth of online sales of books; for example, as the price of books is expensive in the high street, such as WHSmith; customers will switch to online purchase, such as, Amazon. Moreover, the changing in technology also encouraging consumers to switch from traditional printed books sold in high street book stores to e-books sold online. For example, this has been supported by the BBC website which suggests that ‘the total number of printed books sold dropped even further- falling 9.8% to 186.9 million.’ This implies that the continued growth of the digital e-books market sold online has serious impact/responsible for the large decrease in high street book sales. (BBC, 2014)

1   -­‐ -­‐ -­‐ -­‐ -­‐ Hard  Copy  Heritage  Value:  “Best  Sellers”  and  Classic  in  this  Print  Form   will  increase  in  value  with  time  and  become  legacy/heritage  items  for   families,  personal  collecting  -­‐  Hard  Book   Copies  will  not  go  away  and  will   be  much  like  the  Vinyl  33  in  the  record  industry.   Innovate  and  create  their  own  direct  path  to  market  –  Publishers  can   avoid  and  eliminate  middle  players  (Amazon,  Apple,  etc.)  and  go  directly   to  customers  through  social  media  channels  –  a  home  page  on  web,   tweeter,  Facebook  can  be  used  for  promotion,  sales,  and  distribution  of   Publisher  end  products  for  quicker  and  more  direct  sales  –  moving  away   from  mortar  and  bricks  to  on-­‐line  methods.

One of the major problem that I encountered was the problem of book sales. I had to sell twenty copies of my book in a short timescale. However, by reading forums and people 's blogs, I realised that selling twenty books might be more difficult that I thought it would be. Indeed, apparently a lot of people are selling one or two books per week, even if the book is at only 0,99 euros (kdp.forum, 2011). But obviously, marketing is playing an extremely important role, and it also depends on the genre of the book.