Thursday, October 04, 2007

Metropolitan University London

It is one of my tasks to build a strong educational platform for The Wall Street Journal Europe. After all, universities are often the first place where future readers come into contact with our newspaper. It is an adventure to dive into the European Academic world to find out where our newspaper is already present and in what way, or to have new universities join the WSJE educational platform. I reserved a few days to explore the London Academic scene and met amongst others Jonathan Taylor, the man who tried to have our newspaper delivered to the Metropolitan University for his marketing students years ago. I won't tell in detail what the man had to endure before our newspapers were made available to his students a long time ago (his story was definitely not a showcase of a service oriented newspapercompany).

What I did learn was that it is often the action of 1 man, a 'believer' in a specific product, who starts a chain of events which ultimately lead to the establishment of a unique position of that product in his daily environment. When that environment turns out to be a reception area of a university where 1000 students pass by each day, then we should humbly recognize and salute the passion of such a believer. It was only after my visit to him I realised Jonathan Taylor was the co-author of one of the best selling Marketing Communications handbooks in the UK.