We will now turn to a discussion of "Public relations and marketing in ILS education." This topic was suggested during our open discussion period by Katharina J. Blackstead. Katharina is Library Advancement Officer at the University Libraries of Notre Dame. She coordinates the Libraries' grantsmanship initiatives and cooperates with the University's Development Department in efforts to secure funding to enhance all aspects of the Libraries' collections, programs, and services. She is an active member of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA) and has written several articles on academic library development and marketing.
Thanks, Katharina, for leading the discussion on public relations and marketing in a future-oriented ILS program.
I came to Karen in my capacity as chair of the LAMA/PRS Education and Training Committee, who feels it important that there be a place for the study of public relations and marketing in the LIS curriculum of the future. It is our feeling that in times of economic retrenchment (where funding for true progress comes almost exclusively from outside sources) it is public relations and marketing which become the underpinnings of successful institutional development and advancement. Increasingly, all levels of librarians will be called upon to strategically devise ever more effective yet economical methodologies with which to attract the support of the publics of a diverse range of institutions. They must do this creatively, skillfully, and as a consequence of a program of education which has selected them for their potential for being capable of performing this function and has trained them for its successful execution.
Before we knew of this LISTSERV, it was our intention to make contact with a selection of library schools to seek guidance as to how we could best encourage the teaching of PR and marketing at a core-competency level. As a beginning step, and to affirm that which our programming at ALA had led us to suspect (that in the area of PR and marketing, we were faced with librarians at all levels looking for answers, approaches, places to start, tools, etc.), I conducted an informal survey of a number of library schools throughout the country. The results quickly revealed that these topics were generally components of a range of courses (e.g., administration, management, public libraries, etc.), rarely stood on their own, and occasionally were altogether absent from the curriculum. CRISTAL-ED appeared to provide us with the opportunity to affirm the importance of this area of study, to voice a need we have witnessed in LIS education, and to solicit broad input on its possible redress.
To get the ball rolling, I invite your thoughts on any of the following:
If those of you in library education are taking a "wait and see" attitude on this issue, what about those of you practicing in libraries? If you have a keen sense of institutional outreach, if you can identify your various markets and have effective programs aimed at presenting your case sufficiently winningly so as to glean support, from where did this come -- from your library education, or from another source? What was good about your library education in this regard; what was lacking? If you are a librarian who has not, or whose institution has not, given much thought to these issues, how do you handle informing/educating your public(s) and establishing visibility and a sense of place for your library? Do you see a place for the teaching of these skills in LIS education? If not, do you really want someone whose first commitment is not to your profession explaining its essence and that of your institution to your public(s)?
This is not to say that some PR and marketing information does not belong in the curriculum. It would seem to me that a course, or more likely part of a course, could point toward those kinds of libraries where PR and marketing are of utmost importance, i.e., where the library takes most, if not all, of the responsibility for the content and placement of its advertising. Teaching that information? I would lean toward a practicing professional in an advertising agency, in publishing, or in an allied field -- someone who really knows PR and marketing and has the skills.
To spawn another train of thought -- there are lots of things that would deserve a small polling of the Schools, and I wonder if the folks who do the ALISE statistics have thought about doing a summary survey form each year so that the Schools have a predictable workload. Right now there must be half a dozen surveys that go out each year and it can be difficult to get responses. Very often the way a survey is done could benefit everyone by clarifying data that the statistics cannot. It may be that prospective surveyors could benefit from input by the statistics committee, too.
Time for a literature search...
A couple of years ago an FM radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area was carrying a short (15-20 minutes?) generic "what a library can do for you" informational program. One episode, for example, was about government documents.
Before the Northridge Earthquake (1/17/94) it seemed to me there was opportunity for public service television spots -- "success stories" with condensed miniscripts. (e.g., local small businessman with young daughter in tow finds recent periodical article related to his business, and the girl finds [fill-in-the-blank] recreational reading and a video.)
The lure of the World Wide Web and Compuserve/AOL/[fill-in-the blank] may or may not have cut into public library markets. It's important to recognize that there is market segmentation, that many people don't think of a library as a first source for information-gathering, and that population turnover in a geographical area gives any formal PR/marketing events a fairly short half-life. Also, future funding levels (and gifts for special programs) may depend greatly upon consumer loyalty from lesser-served minimarkets in what may appear to be a thriving library.
No matter what type of library a degreed librarian works for, that librarian acquires a new "name" that they then proceed to answer to for their professional life. It's therefore important that they both inform colleagues in their geographical region of services and collections they both have and cannot provide and to become informed of their colleagues' services and collections. Intertype/multitype systems and inter-institutional orientation events and working groups contribute to this needed awareness among professionals. Not knowing where these activities "fit" into the current curriculum, I have the distinct impression from local experience that they lag both technological developments and public media PR.
As we tumble forward into the cable tv-versus-telephone company delivery system battle and online info delivery via Internet connection, both opportunities and challenges will arise daily. I personally wondered, when I moved out of my Northridge apartment into an East San Fernando Valley condo over five years ago, why the service mailings I received (change your locks? drape your windows? install a new garage door opener?) from a local real estate entity didn't contain a "municipal services checklist," including locations of public library branches.
When we re-opened the central core (1973, poured-concrete) of the Oviatt Library for the fall 1994 semester here at California State University, Northridge, there was a lot of LA Times, Daily News, and (on-campus) Sundial publicity, including campus maps showing the still-open 3 temporary facilities and the distribution of services. All year long our primary constituencies of students, faculty, and staff slowly awakened to the fact that the main building was indeed open for full, normal services. And the branch-by-branch re-opening of regional public libraries has found similar patterns of "re-belief." Seeing is believing, and only when the "feet" get to the site does learning seem to occur.
Thank you for this opportunity to share what may be seemingly unrelated perceptions. I write from many years experience in the Los Angeles urban area and recognize that there are both commonalities and differences from other situations.
At Aberystwyth, quite a few years ago, the staff of the College of Librarianship Wales (CLW -- now part of the University of Aberystwyth) engaged in a project to restructure the curriculum to start from the 'user view'. We believed that it was important that students (and practitioners) should retain a clear impression of what it is like to walk, for the first time, through the doors of a library. That 'first impression' has a telling effect on individuals. When our students went on fieldwork they were asked to record quite carefully their experiences (could they find the library; were there signs showing its location?) and feelings (is it welcoming, forbidding; do the staff smile and greet people?) and later to share this information with the staff.
In our teaching we also used the 'user view' as a starting point to explore the organization of knowledge: what information, for example, do users bring to the library about the types of information they are seeking? Where do people find information, if not from a library? The discussions started by such approaches were often revealing, especially if the class included a mix of people from different countries and backgrounds.
In summary, I believe that the starting point for considering marketing is encouraging an awareness of, and sensitivity towards, the user. This is so important before we plunge them into what Ackoff called the 'mess of management'!
There are a number of LIS schools that have separate courses on marketing; at Wisconsin, our course also includes planning, which is also the structure that I prefer to use when I teach our Certificate of Professional Development seminars. For the first time, our SLIS graduate course will be taught on our Educational Teleconferencing Network next spring, and this will allow for a wider pool of students (both in Wisconsin and elsewhere).
Having written and spoken extensively on marketing, I certainly believe that it is the key to both surviving -- and thriving -- in the next century. One of the constraints is really definitional -- as illustrated by the language of this discussion topic: PR and Marketing. In reality, PR and promotion is the tail of the dog, coming as almost the final step in the marketing process. Unfortunately, in many people's minds, there is an (=) between PR and marketing, and this seriously limits both what they expect marketing to do and how they approach the effort. Marketing simply must include (in addition to the well-known phases of planning: mission, environmental scanning, goals, objectives, action strategies and evaluation) what Philip Kotler has named the "4 Ps": Product, Price, Place and Promotion (notice what step comes last!). This entire "marketing mix" is essential to a marketing plan and, as I stated earlier, I believe it is most effective when combined with the elements of planning.
I would be happy to discuss this further or respond to questions...with the caveat that now it is my turn to be away from campus and I will be back in the office briefly on August 14-16, but then am off to IFLA. Routine office hours begin on August 29. I hope that more people on the list now give some thought and comment to this topic.
Keep cool, everyone.
Libraries of all kinds, especially in an environment that is rapidly changing, need to embrace the actual meaning of marketing, which includes market assessment, design of services/products, and promotion/sales of those products. The last, promotion/sales (of which PR is part) is to many in marketing the least of the marketing pieces. Drucker says something like, if you design the right service/product, you won't have to do any promotion.
The library field has historically equated marketing with promotion/sales (PR). We see an advertising campaign as marketing, when it is in fact just the final -- and not the most important -- phase of the marketing cycle. This misunderstanding allows us to assume that our services/products fit the market and blinds us to the challenge of market assessment and subsequent design or redesign of our services. It promotes a one-way communication with our market (us to them) and diminishes the greater need: to listen to the market need (them to us) in order to position services to fit that need.
We do need marketing taught, in its full sense, in schools of library and information science. The market assessment phase is now found, to some degree, in courses that deal with "user needs"; the service/product design phase is rarely taught, as such, to my knowledge; and promotion/sales is occasionally addressed. But in my experience, the pieces, even if they are all there in a given curriculum, are fragmented. The marketing model is a powerful one, and as we go through our own curriculum reform, I now think I'll be recommending to my colleagues that we use it as a unifying model for a chunk of the curriculum -- replacing our units on user needs and surveys with units on market analysis and service/product evaluation (this won't be a big change); and creating one or more units on product/service design. And all of these pieces will need to be explicitly linked as parts of a single integrated process.
I have recently finished my dissertation which dealt with the socialization of LIS students and found that the answer to Katharina's question -- at least for the schools I surveyed -- was a resounding no. When asked to rank the importance of various aspects of the profession, none of the faculty thought that PR was of much importance. Even more interesting was that the students did. While it was never in the rankings of the faculty, it usually came in 4th for students. In fact, this discrepancy was one of the things that came up at my defense. It seemed important to all of us that in this time of tight budgets with everyone vying for the taxpayers' dollars that students recognized the importance of PR when faculty did not.
Identification of exactly what a librarian is promoting and to whom is indeed the first step (Kotler's product, price, place, promotion). But "build it and they will come" (collections, access, services, hours) is an exercise in self-delusion unless "they" know what you have. And something as small as running out of informational handouts and brochures on a high-traffic afternoon can be an act of "de-promotion."
A "typical patron" doesn't seem to exist anymore. Profiles of "current patrons" from in-house surveys or institutional data may not be helpful without significant additional statistical information and population sampling. Maybe the concept of "marketing" should be salted heavily with the concept of "outreach"?
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I'd like to express pleasure (astonished pleasure) at Prof. Thomas Childers (Drexel) sensible remarks noting the tendency library people have to equate marketing with PR, which has marked many previous posts on the topic. To this I would add that I've noted an equal tendency among library people to equate (confuse) marketing with selling, and, worse, with selling products rather than services. The methods are quite different.
I created and taught a one-day workshop last year on services marketing concepts in relation to information service delivery (to an audience of European documentalists and librarians). I focussed on market research methods, for example suggesting appropriate spins on market segmentation in relation to user needs assessments. The work was based on a combination of Robert S. Taylor user-driven concepts, Philip Kotler and others on services marketing, and a group at the university of Texas (Parasuraman et al) on service quality measures. Everyone was mesmerized, although it was of course much to much to cover in the time.
But, to my surprise, the more traditionally-oriented individuals seemed really to resent applying commercial concepts and vocabulary in a non-commercial world. (My answer was to suggest that they think up appropriate terminology for their environments!) In addition, a few others equated being user-driven to doing whatever the users asked for (what I rather rudely call the forelock-tugging method of service delivery), while the main point of the day from my point of view had been that being user-driven means applying specific methodologies, developed int the commercial world, to be sure, to understanding users -- and that the user's presenting question seldom articulates the real information need.
IMHO, then, library school curricula must include these domains of knowledge, but focus specifically on services marketing (planning, research, etc.) as a set of methods and skills applicable to library and information services, and, separately, on public relations, which is not the same thing at all, as another set of methods and skills.
A "practicing" librarian here (maybe some day I'll try doing it for real(?)).
The most effective PR tool I have found has been a weekly column I write for our local daily newspaper. It has been very effective in raising the local awareness of our library and publicizing what is happening there. All I had to do was ask the editor of the newspaper -- she was happy to have free copy. She knows that newspaper readers are interested in the library.
I did not learn how to write columns in library school. I learned basic journalism in high school and in my undergrad education. It is not rocket science, however, and could easily be included in a PR class in MLS education. PR should be a required class.
Sorry, I've got to run for now.
(writing from the U of Mich School of Info. and Lib. Studies DIAD Lab -- on break from the SILS Internet Institutes (excellent!)
Who wants a product and how much will that person pay for the product are two questions one must ask before the product is produced for delivery. Making an undesirable product more attractive by redesigning its packaging is not necessarily going to enhance its presence in the marketplace.
Looking at a product from the viewpoint of a consumer is not a new approach for those with a business background. The consumer's needs should always be an important consideration in any marketing campaign. It is a common mistake of academics to sidestep some of the more fundamental demographic research done in a typical marketing analysis perhaps because this sort of research is rarely encouraged, and perhaps even frowned upon, by the cap and gown set.
On this subject, there is very little to debate. Without a sensitivity for the end-user, the effectiveness of product design is always questionable.
It is more than 5 years since UNESCO produced a guide to teaching Marketing in LIS courses (written by Rejean Savard of the University of Montreal). Even before that it was fairly common in the SLIS in the developed countries, and most of us regarded it as an integral part of our curricula.
While librarians are very good at matching call numbers with books, subject terms with data bases, and ready reference questions with ready reference sources, we are less adept at taking those matching skills to the next level --developing products that match with community needs and then telling folks about it, which is the essence of marketing and PR.
I believe this is true because the majority of us perceive no need to market or pr because we get away with offering supply-driven materials and services to captive audiences in school and academic libraries instead of demand-driven materials and services to non- captive audiences who have a CHOICE about how they meet their info needs.
There is a great irony here because Ron Blazek of Fla. State has shown pretty conclusively that the key to student use of libraries is the influence of teachers. If teachers are to exert this needed influence, we have to be good marketing and pr agents.
Most public librarians understand this. Special librarians do, or they soon get cut adrift from the mother ship.
When we get more comfortable with the notion that we must address the issue of Supply AND Demand, not the foolish dichotomy of Supply VERSUS Demand, more of us will be won over to actively discovering need and developing products and services which address that need.
As long as our LIS schools teach only low level matching skills, however, and not those required to attract and keep as customers people who have choices about how they solve their info problems, our LIS grads won't find out about the need to market and pr until they get into the business, itself.
Hiring Marketers and PRers to do our marketing and PR is not selling out or turning over these practices to strangers. It is acknowledging the need to M and PR and it is calling in the professionals to do what they do best. Maybe some day LIS curricula will churn out M and PR practitioners; for now raising LIS grads' awareness that M and PR are essential tools for information professionals to have access to would be a major breakthrough. It could happen.
To date, discussants are responding from a number of perspectives, and while there have been some interesting arguments for leaving marketing to another category of professionals, there are also compelling arguments for its inclusion into future LIS curricular structures. My own experiences with continuing education on a regional and national level have revealed library professionals from a broad spectrum of institutions desperate for tools which the short-term programs and workshops I have been able to put in place have not adequately addressed, tools which only semester-long efforts could properly hone. From what I have seen, the external marketing support systems to which some advocate that we turn are not as plentiful or satisfactory as they could be -- and the survival of our institutions depends on their quality and availability.
I am delighted that some of you have satisfactory outlets for your institutional "outreach" requirements. From what I have seen, that is not the case for many more, and in many other instances, it is the librarian's expertise, initiative, persistence, and the information that s/he is able to provide to the "outreach organ" that makes the critical difference between the lackluster and the compelling in the resulting product.
Peter Drucker is absolutely right -- the right product requires little else to become a smashing success. Most of us, however, do not have the luxury of working with top-of-the-line products to which our publics are naturally drawn. We build our collections, programs and services step by step, and in the face of daunting financial obstacles. And while we build, we must continually analyze all our markets, and, in order to be able to continue, must promote that which we currently have (which, in most instances, is FAR from the "right" product) in order to obtain the support to build some more. I would submit that this process is far more effective when performed with an intimate knowledge of the product and executed with the sense of passion and vitality that comes from both professional commitment to the cause at hand and an understanding of the basics of marketing. Conversely, this process is less than effective when performed by someone whose knowledge of the product is at best, scant, and who, believing in his/her heart that "libraries are a tough sell," (how many times have you all heard THAT one?) puts only a thin and barely cosmetically tolerable face on whatever outreach is being performed.
I, too, believe that the future of libraries lies in part on the marketing and, yes, fundraising expertise of librarians. And I believe that there is another management principle appropriate to cite here. Taken from a popular leadership model, it allows for the delegation of all but the most critical processes, and cautions that the latter be held closely and dearly, and never be neglected. I believe that this principle can be credibly and profitably transferred to a professional parallel -- to OUR professional parallel, and that we had best regard it carefully in the case of marketing and other emerging tools of survival for our profession by offering them consistently throughout our LIS educational programs.
Since I've spent 30 years in Marketing, in both UK and USA, before "retooling" myself in Information Studies I was interested in your dialog on the role of PR and Marketing in Library Education. I feel as if I am butting into an existing conversation, so please forgive me if I am repeating what has already been said. Also, in view of the closure of the window on this subject today, my remarks are ad lib.
First, I hope that everyone in whatever job they have, recognizes that they have "customers," and that they prosper in their roles because their customers let them. The primary focus of the Total Quality movement, and the re-engineering of corporations is towards devising organizations and systems which provide their customers with value-added services.
Inherent in this process is identifying who your customers are, and what they want. This process may be called marketing, and includes the "4Ps" of product, price, place, and promotion. (Of course, in the interests of alliteration "product" also means "service," and "place" means the means and organization of distribution). So marketing applies as much to products as it does to services, and it applies to all transactions between supplier and customer.
Business success will result when the business provides the customer with what he wants, when he wants it, at a price he can afford. The challenge therefore lies in NOT ONLY identifying your customers, AND what they want, BUT ALSO in providing it in a timely and cost-effective way. Without clear and accurate marketing at the front-end of the process, the "product" that is supplied is likely to be inappropriate, and the customers won't want it.
Therefore, marketing is an essential component of everyone's education, not least those who are dealing with many, diverse, customers. The fact that the 'market' is hard to define should not be a reason to ignore marketing -- it should be the reason to pay more attention to marketing.
It is also easy to see why "marketing" should be seen as "hype,smoke and mirrors, etc." or "just PR." Often, and regrettably that is what it is. But marketing is far more than this. It is the mechanism whereby the customer's (user's) needs are fed into the process of delivering our service, and it is ignored at our peril.
For reading on how marketing should be done, refer to The Chartered Institute of Marketing in England. 'Fraid I don't have their address right now, but I'll be pleased to send it to you if anyone wants to follow up.
Hope this is useful.
First I would like to thank Ian Johnson for quoting my booklet on teaching marketing in LIS. However, since the first version (in French) was written in 1988, I should warn my colleagues that it is getting a little old! Some parts are certainly useful, but it needs to be revised (I would like to do it but other projects are taking all my time !).
I started to work on the idea of applying marketing to library and information services when I was a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto fifteen years ago. I introduced the teaching of marketing at our school in Montreal in 1982, first in a lecture within a course on users and users studies. Since that time marketing took progressively more place in the curriculum. Today, all our first year students receive a marketing introduction during their first year. In the second year curriculum, there is an elective course specifically on marketing (we are fortunate to have a two year program...). I also had the opportunity to teach marketing in several schools of library and information science in French-speaking countries of Europe and Africa. This experience was successful and I certainly believe more than ever now, that marketing is a fundamental issue for the development and survival of library and information services, especially for public libraries which will have to be sustained by all the modern management tools that we now have at our disposal, including marketing. Therefore I believe that all library school students should receive at least an introduction to marketing theories (minimum 15 hours). I also think that an elective advanced course is necessary for those more interested in or intending to become library managers (which will probably happen to a large part of our graduates...).
However, I share the remarks that have been made by some of my colleagues. As Darlene Weingand wrote in this forum, the main problem with marketing is "definitional": marketing is not only a "promotion gimmick." It is a management philosophy which puts the customer in the first place. It is also a powerful tool to maximize the EXCHANGE process between an organization and its different publics. In fact, the important keyword in marketing theory for me is the word `exchange'. It think it is particularly important to stress this point; since everybody and every organization deals with the exchange process, it is right to say that every organization is in a marketing process, whether they realize it or not. That's why it would be better for librarians and information specialists to have real marketing notions... and not only PR techniques or tools.
The marketing model is not only a powerful model as Tom Childers said, it is also revolutionary. If it is fully adopted by managers, they will have to audit their products and services and judge them in relation to their customers' needs (...and not only demands and wants such as Mike Harrison said). Logically, then, managers will have to eliminate some of their products, or adapt them, and probably create and develop new products. It may be true as Katharina said that most of the librarians do not have "the luxury of working with top-of-the line products", but why do not change them and adopt new ones? I understand that it is sometimes difficult to eliminate a product that has been available in our library for a long time -- a product which is sometimes more the object of affection by a passionate librarian than a real need for the customers -- but in time of economic constraints, we have to do it. That is what marketing teaches us all, and that is why I say it is revolutionary.
I am now conducting research on the marketing orientation of library managers. Kotler and others have established an interesting theoretical framework where they oppose the marketing orientation or client orientation to what could be called organization-centered orientations where managers are more product-oriented, production oriented, or selling-oriented. Having completed the first step of my work (literature review and interviews with library managers), it is becoming increasingly more evident to me that librarians are more "organization-centered" than "marketing oriented." In fact, it seems they tend to be strongly "product-oriented". Librarians have always loved books and documents, and also the work of organizing them. Now some of them are turning towards new technologies, which are also new products or tools that might deserve their customer needs, but not necessarily so. Librarians are sometimes also recognized as service-oriented professionals, but this service orientation seems to be limited to the products or services that can be already found in the library. They are not necessarily open to developing new products for their customers' needs, and they are reluctant to abandon some of the products they think the customer needs.
I think this product-orientation of librarians and of library-educators might be one of the reasons, among others of course, why marketing is not more spread among library school curricula.
When working mainly with things or objects or tools, it is certainly easier to get control over the object of our work. But when people are at the center of our concerns, work becomes much more complex. And marketing always brings us back to human concerns.
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