B & N College Bookstore And Mcgraw-Hill Case Study

The conflict between B&N College bookstore and McGraw-Hill originates from the fact that McGraw-Hills publishers have decided to establish a new return policy on their books. McGraw-Hill blames B&N for not being able to accurately estimate their inventory needs, resulting in a big quantity of new, unsold textbooks returned to McGraw-Hill. The primary reason why we assist to a lot of textbook return in the college textbook industry is because of inaccuracies in predicting college enrollment levels. The factors contributing to this phenomenon are demographic factors. In fact, Demographic trends show a decrease in the level of enrollment in U.S. universities and colleges. In addition, a lot of nontraditional students are returning to college making

The case says that college educational publishing has remained in the hands of a few large publisher on the market. In addition, those produce a small volume of textbooks. Establishing a new return policy shows that McGraw-Hill has a coercive power on B&N. In this case, we can see that this new policy is an attempt to punish B&N because they keep returning a large number of their textbooks. There is also a balance of power between university’s professors and McGraw-hills because Professors are the ones that ask college bookstores to order from particular publishers. In reality, if those decide to select textbooks from another publisher for their courses B&N will stop selling McGraw-Hill textbooks. However, McGraw-hill still has a big advantage because as the case says there are a few large publishers of college textbook in the market and McGraw-Hill is one of the best of

According to McGraw-Hill, they allowed the bookstores several years to solve their inventory problems before actually implementing the revised return policy. This shows that McGraw-Hill has the expectation that B&N will change its behavior with and be able to accurately order the accurate number of textbooks that they need. It did not happen, that why there is conflict. Perceptional differences exist when various channel members perceive the same stimuli but attach quite different interpretation. In this case, B&N orders textbooks according to the number of students they think will come to purchase them. However, demographic conditions make these estimations difficult. McGraw-Hill on its side believes that there is no need to carry such large inventories at the retail level. Goal Incompatibilities can also cause the conflict. In fact, McGraw-Hill thinks that B&N order large quantities of new textbooks simply as an insurance in case they don’t have enough used book available to sell. The case does not say that that 's the goal of B&N but if this is true there is a problem of goal incompatibility between the two channel