Dr Stephen Dann

Textbooks

10 years, seven books, and a few hundred powerpoint supplemental files later, the Dann and Dann franchise was one of the most recognised names in Australian text book marketing, sparking quips from some publishers that “If you don’t have a Dann and Dann book in the franchise, you’re not really publishing marketing”. We wrapped it up by going back to our origins with a final eMarketing text, before closing the curtain on the textbook

Beginning in 2000, Susan and Stephen published a series of coauthored textbooks in the Australian and New Zealand markets.  We wrote four original texts which started with a good idea, and ended with a published book – EMarketing Theory and Application, Competitive Marketing Strategy (2007), Introduction to Marketing (2004) and Strategic Internet Marketing (2001 and 2004).

Probably our signature / flagship work when it came to providing support materials. Have a read through the backstory of the work, and see some of the supplemental materials we put out to make adopting the text that much easier for the classroom

In one of the better “life lesson not learned”, our 2007 text was a response to the American Marketing Association’s freshly minted 2004 definition of marketing (which wrecked our Intro text’s relevance). It comes as no surprise in retrospect that the AMA released a new definition in 2007, and haven’t changed it since. Still, we had a run of new research, improved models and other upgrades during this one, so the backstory is worth a look

  • Dann, S. and Dann, S (2004), Strategic Internet Marketing 2nd edition, Brisbane: Wiley [Amazon | PDF]

Strategic Internet Marketing and SIM2.0 were the break through textbooks for us as a franchise, and there’s a backstory to go with it..  We moved from being Susan Dann and Stephen Dann to Dann S and Dann S to eventually just Dann and Dann as people tried to pin the lead authorship either on me (as the junior partner) or Susan (as the senior partner), and refused to believe that it was a genuine partnership. Says a lot about academia really. There’s also an interesting historical footnote in this being a 14 week semester design, given the proliferation of 12 week semesters these day – plus it’s the story of how we changed the entire game for academic texts in our domain.

Dann, S. & Dann, S (2004), Introduction to Marketing, Brisbane: Wiley [Amazon | Trove | PDF]

Introduction to Marketing was an attempt to produce the definitive local text for the Australian market. Tragically for the book, we were heavily influenced by the AMA (1985) definition, only to launch at the start of 2004 when the AMA released the revised edition midyear. Yes, this was a recurring theme of my textbooks and their shelf lives. Read about the challenges of trying to oust a market leader with a firm that was super keen on not achieving that, despite our efforts and their stated intentions

We worked on one adaptation in that period – bringing the US author Michael Solomon’s Consumer Behaviour to the Australian market, and I worked on a single player contibution to a team book.

  • Solomon, Dann, Dann, & Bennett (2007), Consumer Behaviour, Pearson Education (first edition)

I don’t particularly enjoy adaptations, which I discovered after adapting the work. The first volume of any Australian adaptation is done from the master copy of the text, and subsequent adaptations are done on that manuscript – so it’s very easy to end up with a significant drift from what the original author is saying in their homeground text, and what the adaptation team is saying in the localisation. As an original author, that made me very uncomfortable, and when I wasn’t granted access to the next edition of the Solomon CB original text, I chose to walk away from the project. No backstory, just a worthwhile trial of a technique that I didn’t pick up as an ongoing approach/

I have a solo (as in not working with Susan) contribution to another textbook as well

This is one of my highest cited works, and sits proudly atop the food chain of my Google Scholar counts, which is pretty solid going for a turn of the century work. Still, I’m less about the contributed chapters and more about the whole-of-book experience, so this was also not a path I chose to pursue. You gotta know what you do well, what you want to do once for the experience so you can be informed in deciding what you don’t want to do again. Yes, if I had my time again, I’d do the adaptation and the chapter for the same reason – to get the experience to make an informed choice.

As you’ll have noticed, we stopped textbook writing in 2011

The Challenge of Text Book Writing