Marketing Today's Academic Library: A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students

193 Pages·2009·1.43 MB·English

by  Brian Mathews

Marketing Today’s
Academic Library
a Bold new approach
to Communicating
with students
B r i a n M at h e w s
AmericAn LibrAry AssociAtion
Chicago 2009
brian mathews is the user experience librarian at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. He has an MLIS from the University of South Florida. He
has published numerous journal articles and is an active speaker and
panel member on a variety of library topics, particularly on increasing
the awareness of library serv ices to students. His blog is The Ubiquitous
Librarian: http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com.
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information
appearing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied,
on the accuracy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and
hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by
errors or omissions in this publication.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
Library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mathews, Brian (Brian Scott)
Marketing today’s academic library : a bold new approach to
communicating with students / Brian Mathews.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8389-0984-3 (alk. paper)
1. Academic libraries—Marketing. 2. Academic libraries—Public
relations. 3. Libraries and students. 4. Advertising—Libraries. I. Title.
Z716.3.M344 2009
021.7—dc22 2008047408
Copyright © 2009 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved
except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright
Revision Act of 1976.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-0984-3
Printed in the United States of America
13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to college students
around the world, who deserve
better library experiences

Contents
Foreword
del ross, interContinental hotels Group vii
aCknowledGMents xi
ProloGue
Becoming ubiquitous xiii
1 Do Libraries Need to Advertise? 1
2 Defining the User 7
3 Student Need States 24
4 The Library as Product 30
5 Conducting Marketing Research 43
6 Building Relationships 68
7 Developing Brand Strategies 86
8 Promotional Building Blocks 99
9 Designing Messages 117
10 Measuring the Impact 132
11 Putting It All Together 142
v
vi Contents
ePiloGue
staging academic experiences 159
aFterword
amanda Mcnamee, Georgia institute of technology 163
index 165
Foreword
MOST LIBRARIANS DID NOT ENTER THIS
profession because of a passion for marketing.
Despite this, marketing skills have become a key
element of a successful career in the field. At the same time, marketing
itself has become far more complicated—it is no longer merely enough
to craft a good message. To be successful today, a relevant marketer
must also master the media through which his message is conveyed. In
other words, this transformation of the role of librarian has happened
during a time when it has never been more difficult to become an effec-
tive marketer.
This challenge is not unique to your profession. In my field—
e-commerce and distribution channel management—it took me about
twelve years to admit that I was a marketer. My professional life has
been focused on consumer-facing Internet (and other emerging media)
business models since 1995, and my four patents all concern perfor-
mance-based business models that are enabled by these media. Even so,
for a long time I thought of myself as a general business manager who
liked technology. Three years ago, I was rewarded for my e-commerce
success by being given responsibility for the other distribution channels
used by my company, InterContinental Hotels Group, in the Americas
region. The name of our department was to become Distribution Mar-
keting, a decidedly unsexy label that seemed to lack the geek-chic of my
prior roles. However, after briefly considering a protest, I was finally
forced to recognize that, as someone who spent all of his working life
figuring out ways to influence consumer behavior, I was, in fact, a mar-
keter and would just have to deal with it.
vii
viii Foreword
The thing is, marketing is hard. It always has been, but in the past
decade and a half it has gotten a whole lot harder. In the pre-Internet
days, marketers had to worry about
1. Who they needed to target their offerings to
2. Where those people could be reached
3. What message to send them
In addition, they had a theoretical obligation to track the results of their
efforts. This was often very difficult or even impossible to do and was
often left out for the sake of expediency, giving rise to a common mea-
surement philosophy: “Half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just
don’t know which half!” The good news was that there were really only
a handful of media available to choose from (challenge number two)—
outdoor advertising, print, and broadcast, with a pretty significant con-
centration of audiences within each medium.
As you will learn in this remarkable book for librarians, today’s mar-
keters have all of these traditional challenges compounded by a much
wider array of media choices (expanding daily), far less audience con-
centration, and a target consumer base that is increasingly empowered
to control their exposure to marketing messages based on their indi-
vidual definitions of relevance, intrusiveness, style, and convenience.
Perversely, we have also entered the Age of Marketing Accountability,
spurred by the exacting precision by which the actual value of online
marketing can be measured, so the old adage about measurement futil-
ity has now been banished from the workplace as a relic of the past. As
I said, marketing is hard.
While there is no magic formula for marketing success (and if there
were, I would probably keep the secret to myself), there have emerged a
few clear-cut recipes for failure. One such doomed approach is to deter-
minedly ignore new and emerging media while clinging to anything
that worked in the past. Any librarian-marketer who has ambitions
for repeated success must embrace an early adopter-tester philosophy
combined with a willingness to tolerate failure on a regular basis. If the
target audience includes the eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old genera-
tion, this mandate is amplified at least fourfold.
As Brian Mathews will explain in practical terms, this means you,
the marketer (it’s OK, you can admit it), should start off each day think-
ing about how you might want to leverage some new communication
medium. How will you leverage the iPhone? The chumby? Twitter?
Foreword ix
Facebook and MySpace? Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox? Have you
updated your library website with the latest usability and functional
conventions and expectations of your audience? Are you keeping up
with the latest organic search indexing algorithms on Google? What
about the wild world of wikis and Web 2.0? (As I write this, I think of
someone picking up Brian’s book in fifteen years, reading this foreword,
and mistaking it for a user’s guide to some kind of museum of antiqui-
ties. Will anyone even be reading then—or will Web 6.0/Mobile 12G
include some way of beaming desired data right into the brain from
the ether? Will we market directly to our audiences at all, or will the
“market through, not to” model have emerged as the dominant means of
influencing behavior and consumer choice?)
As librarians, you don’t have to answer all these questions, but you
do have to try to answer them. You also need to keep up with what
everyone around you is trying to do in order to avoid repeating their
mistakes. In other words, strap in and hold on—this is going to be a
wild ride!
Brian’s book is targeted to the unique marketing challenges within
the media sciences world—particularly with respect to influencing the
mercurial student market, but its message is relevant to any consumer
marketer in the modern world. (The irony of media/archival specialists
using a book to learn about the potential of new media is not lost on us-
Gutenberg would be pleased to know that his invention has yet to be
surpassed as a vehicle of knowledge-sharing!) I think you will enjoy it,
but please take some time to act on it as well!
Del Ross
Vice President of Distribution
Marketing, InterContinental
Hotels Group