Libraries and Marketing - challenges and solutions?

1. Libraries and Marketing- challenges and solutions? Jens Thorhauge Danish Agency for Libraries and Media

2. Problem • Most libraries are weak in marketing. Thinking in terms of marketing in a public context is a relatively new trend • Public relations – telling about your services and products has a longer tradition, but marketing • Involving an approach to product design that reflects the documented needs of the target groups seem to be a very appropiate foundation for modern library services

3. The top professional way is based on Kotler: • Marketing is a managerial process involving analysis, planning, implementation, control • It has carefully formulated programs – not random actions • Based on voluntary exchange, and marketing • Selects target markets - not to be all things to all people • Marketing is correlated to organisational objectives • Emphasis on user’s needs and desires rather than producer’s preferences • Product, place, price, promotion

4. The everyday down to earth questions • Do your community know your library? Users/nonusers? • Did you plan activities and services in relation to the community? • Do they have an appropriate image of the services? • Can they find their way to the library in the city space? • Will they recognize the library when they pass it? • Does the library communicate the identity that you want it to communicate? • Can the users find their way inside the library? • Did you identify their needs and did you design products to meet them? • Did you make a plan for communication?

5. Commercial ways • Danish supermarkets compet on special offers and market them weekly by advertising and brochures. • A chain of hardware dealers - some 150 shops- organise their activities based on 12-14 ’bursts’ pr year. A ’burst’ is a campaign on season or trend related products communicating by advertising, brochures, display of products in the store. Price pr. burst: 0,6 – 1,0 mio. Euro. • A Swedish campaign on library lovers recently run to the cost of 1,5 mio. Euro – Impact?

6. Most libraries must find other ways due to budgets • If you have none or random marketing activities it is time to do something • Key activities are analysis, cooperation and planning and competence-development • Analysis should be directed towards the role and potentials of your library in the community • And you might in a group of libraries help each other to a service-check of the involved libraries • By answering a list of down to earth questions

7. Do your community know your library • What do you know about your customers? Do you know why citizens don’t use the library? • Surveys can be made on many levels. • Ask patrons coming in the library a few relevant questions, • Ask them to fill in a simple questionaire • Ask visitors at your homepage what they need and what they like • Telephone interview to a number of random citizens • Ask questions to reveal their image of the library (multiple choice questions)

8. Planning activities in relation to your community • Which activities are needed - where can you cooperate with other partners, what are the relevant target groups you can identify- how big are they? • Families with pre-school children - kindergardens • Schoolchildren – schools, clubs • Web-users • Drive-in users, library lovers, students working in the library • Elderly

9. Can the citizens find their way – to and in the library? • Programmes on sign boards? • Do you take the classification system for granted? • Do you use other ways to display material? • Have you got a basic idea in your interior design? • Do you have huge posters on exhiibitions, flags or any other eyecatchers on the library facade?

10. Does the library communicate the image that you want it to communicate - does it work? • Or will you find a gap between the hybrid library profile with multimedia offers and web-based services that you are working hard to provide and the image among citizens of a bookcollection, an atmosphere from old days and librarians that act like keepers of the collection? • If the answer is yes you need a strategy to overcome the gap- good stories on the new services told in any available place

11. Did you identify needs and design programmes to meet them? • Needs should be identified within the frames of the mission of the library – if children want sweets they must go somewhere else. • Identify needs by statisticks, by self analysis, via partners. Ask users about preferences. • Example on needs: • To stimulate language amond preschool-children • To develop reading abilities among schoolchildren • To develop webliteracy – multimodal competencies • To stimulate and inspire many different groups

12. Did you make a plan for communication and marketing? • Some elements • What image will you communicate? • What messages? • Which groups are you planning to reach? • Which channels do you choose • Schoolteachers, local papers (publicity, stories, advertising), cooperation with clubs and associations, brochures, leaflets, direct mail, web-based marketing

13. A few Danish initiatives • Marketing by national contests and quizzes among schoolchildren- • Coperation on providing a ’toolbox’ for library marketing – templets, grafics, models, drawings and photos etc. • Marketing plans and programmes developped among a group af libraries – the chain-shop model • Web marketing on e-reference services