Addison Wesley Longman Case

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MARKETING ENGINEERING FOR EXCEL • CASE • VERSION 2.0.0



Case
Addison Wesley Longman
By Gary L. Lilien & Arvind Rangaswamy


Product Planning Using the GE/McKinsey
Approach at Addison Wesley Longman
It was July 1997 and Mark Roth, manager of business books at Addison
Wesley Longman, was facing a bit of a dilemma. He was about to present his
1998 fiscal year new book budget and had three new marketing books in his
portfolio. One of them, Marketing Engineering, was a bit different from the
other two. It did not currently have a large natural market but might
ultimately be a big winner, he thought, if it were promoted properly. He was
about to make his plans for annual promotion, kicking his program off at the
August American Marketing Association Educator’s Conference in Chicago. His
main question was – how should he prioritize the promotional resources for
the three new books?
Background
Addison Wesley Longman is one of the largest global educational publishers, selling books, multimedia and learning programs in all major academic disciplines to the primary, secondary, higher education, professional, and
English language teaching markets throughout the world.
AWL is part of the Pearson Group. Pearson PLC, headquartered in London, is
an international provider of media content and is composed of information, education and entertainment companies. Pearson reported the following fiscal
year-end figures:
1996 Sales ($ mil.): $3,746.8 1-Yr. Sales Growth: 19.5%
1996 Net Inc. ($ mil.): $413.1 1-Yr. Net Inc. Growth: (7.7%)
1996 Employees: 17,383
1-Yr. Employee Growth: (10.5%)
In addition to AWL, some of Pearson’s companies include: the Financial Times
Newspaper, Penguin/Putnam, The Economist Group, Pearson Professional and
Pearson Television. In 1988,