Issue 21 Spring 1996 What is Marketing? Is Marketing a Truly Dirty Word for Librarians? Martyn Kempson	Collections under which this       article appears:       Management Related Articles or Resources

This article is based upon a paper given at the Youth Libraries Group Weekend School 'Selling Yourself and Your Services: Marketing and Sales in the Library Context', held in September 1995 at the University of Ripon and St. John, York. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the London Borough of Barnet.

INTRODUCTION
I have always been keen on stock promotion, and I confess I have sometimes let this enthusiasm run away with me. When I was 15 I worked in a branch library as a library assistant and I was left in charge over the lunch hour as there were only two of us. Sex education books were kept in a locked cupboard behind the counter with a sign at the appropriate Dewey place on the shelves saying 'For Sex Education please ask the Librarian' or words to that effect. I felt it my duty as a normal spotty 15 year old to acquaint myself fully with the contents of this cupboard and it became my sole reading for many weeks whilst the librarian was at lunch. To my intense disappointment no one ever asked to see the cupboard stock until one day when a middle aged woman asked me "got any books on sterilisation luv?" Her feet did not touch - I whisked her behind the counter, unlocked the cupboard, my hand snaked unerringly to a book and I pronounced - "well there aren't any books solely about sterilisation but there is a chapter in this one". I handed it over - she looked at it for a moment and then in a puzzled voice said "no dear - pots and pans, pots and pans".

I am a librarian who has worked in and for the public library service ever since I left school 33 years ago. I have been fortunate to work at Luton, Buckinghamshire, Sutton and Barnet but frankly declare my mentor was the much maligned Roy Smith, the former Borough Librarian of Sutton. A man who with sheer determination, bloody-mindedness, persistence and single-minded campaigning used all the skills of marketing - especially public relations, publicity and packaging, and persuaded a Conservative local authority in the 1970's to replace its run down Victorian central library with a new building in the town centre. Some seven times larger than the former library with increased staffing, computerised operations, extended opening hours and bookfund, he then kept the small Sutton library service in the eye of the profession with a series of new service developments and gimmicks that so raised the profile of the library service locally that its budget became secure from political attack from all quarters.

All through that period, the establishment of the public library service, fellow chief librarians, library schools and the blessed Library Association, scorned his approach and derided his gimmicks, such as lending umbrellas as well as books and all night novel readings, as irrelevant to the true purpose of the library service. Bringing commercialism into the world of libraries was an anathema - encouraging local businesses to display and sell their wares in his exhibition galleries was tacky. And all the time the critics missed the point. What he was doing in Sutton was acting out Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'the medium is the message', and making the library service in Sutton news; important, interesting, controversial and fun - so much so that the local newspaper ran vox pops to ask the people in the street what they thought about exhibitions and developments in the library. And surprise, surprise, people used the service more. Loans per head of population were consistently the highest in London. More businesses, voluntary organisations, advice agencies, radio stations and television crews wanted to get involved with the library service, and an upward spiral was created. And yes, his team did these things for our own mixed motives, and yes, some of it was ego, but the abiding underlying motivation was to build and protect the library service and leave it in a stronger position than when we inherited it. Now, of course, long after he has retired there is the faintest grudging recognition in the library establishment that perhaps his approach might have some merits - hence I'm here!

I went from Sutton to Barnet and have tried for the past three years to adopt and adapt some of that approach and philosophy. This is not, I hope, one of those 'how I run my library good' lectures and I am making no claims for Barnet to be as good or better than anywhere else, but I do claim that Barnet has a vision of what and where it wants to be and knows some of the tools it has to use to get there.

Let me take a look at the Public Library Service today. A service in crisis, a service that constantly looks back to its roots and tries to cling to some comfort blanket it sucked in its childhood, some outworn concept of being 'free' when it so palpably is not, anymore than the National Health Service is free. A service that pretends it serves the whole community when it demonstrably does not. Market research shows that it is largely irrelevant to a huge segment of the population, unaware of its customer base and arrogant in its professionalism but inept in customer care, resentful of its critics.

It is a service that does not understand its relationship with its own suppliers, that talks about working in partnership with booksellers but really means taking money from them in sponsorship and then switching business from one company to another at a moments notice in casual disregard for that so called partnership. A library service that can see the prison service, the health service, the policy units of the civil service privatised but still does not believe it could happen to public libraries and cannot hear the doomsday clock ticking. A service so naive that it clutches at the faint hope that somehow it will all be better if only we had a new government or a new council or a new chief librarian.

Exaggerated? Maybe, but we have to be realistic and recognise that as the squeeze on local government finance tightens, we have to help ourselves if we are to survive and hopefully grow. Distasteful as some people may find it, we need to employ modern marketing techniques to survive. A dictionary definition of marketing: "the action, business or process of promoting and selling a product including market research, choice of product, advertising and distribution". Textbook definitions include the following:

At its most general level 'marketing' is the presentation of a proposition in a way in which it is most likely to be accepted. Whether it is the packaging of a brand of cat food, a new library or the election manifesto of a political party; marketing is distinguished from other business activities by the way it takes the customers' point of view and looks back. But this is only the beginning, the customers perspective may illuminate such weaknesses in the proposition that it needs to be totally changed.

There are as many definitions of marketing as there are marketing books and associate professors, we all have mental models which we use for solving real life problems. These derive from our own experience but some models only sort some problems. I have read that soldiers see marketing as commercial warfare: economists as equations, sociologists as groups making exchanges and statisticians as probabilities. Librarians? We may discover how they see things during this weekend.

Marketing is not just advertising, promotions, public relations packaging and other forms of presentation. It is the totality of the product.

This is the definition I subscribe to and the point of my introductory remarks about the approach taken in Sutton in the mid 1970s and early 1980s.

Underpinning all of this is the necessity for librarians to recognise that they exist and work in an increasingly politicised world. The library service will not be able to compete for funds with social services, housing and education, recycling and the green lobby unless it can demonstrate to the politicians who control the purse strings that it is a vital, valued and well used public service which can contribute to ways of delivering the council's corporate policy plan. All councils have them, occasionally they are not published, but usually they are, and Barnet's plan describes the priorities for the council for the next four years. Not a service plan, please note, these exist for every council department, but a strategic plan.

The four year plan for Barnet comprises 14 pages but has six key aims for the council of which number one is Open Government. The plan reads:

Barnet Council is committed to opening up its decision-making procedures to ensure that the public are involved and are heard as part of the democratic process. It will ensure that a range of initiatives are acted upon to make this happen. We will look to establish a network of first stop shops throughout the Borough based on existing office accommodation and staff to enable residents to have the easiest possible access to our services.

Those first stop shops could have been located anywhere - Town Halls, housing or social services offices. I have been arguing that libraries are the natural place for these initiatives because we already have the largest customer base as our libraries are strategically located in population centres. We have trained staff and information professionals, and have created a positive image with a large cross section of the community. The London Planning Action Group discovered that, of all public institutions, ethnic minorities had trust in the integrity and neutrality of the public library services to give advice and service in an unbiased way. Library staff are, by and large, computer literate and good communicators and they actually enjoy and obtain job satisfaction from helping people. And the final clincher - it will be cheaper to deliver the service through libraries.

So it has been agreed and our first pilot first stop shop opens shortly in a large area library. I expect another four or five to open in the next 18 months or so. And what have we got out of this? Recognition that the library service is the lead department in delivering one of the council's key corporate objectives for the next four years - and consequently the preservation and development of the budget, staffing and opening hours necessary to deliver this. A reinforcement in the eye of the consumer that the library is the place to go for information and assistance. Some relief, confidence, and pride put back into the staff who can feel recognised and valued as the people who will deliver a new and vital council service and who are not just peripheral to the council's plans.

And so we should spend time, energy and imagination adapting and developing things that the library service does so well to deliver the council's priorities - it is easy to create Open for Learning Centres to assist with a council's Economic Development Plan. Every council wants to help retrain and find work for its residents. What are the priorities in your corporate plan, benefit take up, education, nursery classes? The library service can develop exhibitions, displays, governors' corners, host events, workshops and so on.

Let us now go back to the component parts of the definition of marketing and have a few words on each.

PUBLIC RELATIONS AND PUBLICITY
Public relations is not only concerned with communicating for marketing purposes - to establish and maintain understanding and goodwill for the organisations' services - it is concerned with the broader purpose of creating a favourable atmosphere within which the organisation may operate successfully.

All councils have public relations officers and they are desperate for friends. Their life consists of dragging the organisation out of the holes that it has got itself into, largely despised by the media they have to deal with, misunderstood and feared by local government staff because of their close relationship with politicians. And yet they too have targets to deliver in this new world. They have to publish their performance indicators - how many press calls they have handled - how many press releases issued and what percentage were actually used and published by the press etc. If you need to develop better public relations (and we all need to do this), ring the public relations officer and buy him or her lunch. They will be gobsmacked, flattered and intrigued by the invitation. Ask them how your library service can make life easier for the press office and how you can improve the library image. Build a relationship that means that when the press office rings you for information you and yours drop everything to deliver the correct answer as quickly as possible. Your service will soon be regarded as the role model for the rest of the council and lo and behold the press office will put more effort into selling your stories, your happenings, your library service and people will notice. The politicians will like the increased coverage, the press office will like the fact that they deal with a colleague who understands their business and does not have to be dragged screaming to the phone when they ring, and you will be showing the library service's professionalism to the rest of the council.

As far as publicity is concerned I agree with Dominic Behan who said there is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary! Your libraries are awash with good news stories but all too often library staff are so close to the stories, so familiar with the success, they miss them. Staff need to be taught how to know a good story when they see one, and to be aware that for it to have any promotional value at all it must be actioned immediately - old news is not news at all.

Having bought the Head of Press and Public Relations lunch you have to dig even deeper and court the press. This will prove infinitely more time consuming than lunch for the PR manager but is an essential long term investment. What you are seeking is a partnership with the local papers - if you can get your local newspaper involved to promote a library initiative you are home and dry. The paper will ensure that the promotion gets maximum coverage and if there are problems with the event any adverse public reaction will be minimised. You cannot put a price on this kind of venture and you certainly could not afford to buy the press coverage that this kind of partnership generates. It is obvious that the local paper will wish to be only associated with a success _ therefore your venture will be a success and portrayed as such. The relationship you establish with your local paper staff is crucial to the decision taken every day in newspaper offices - do we send the one photographer to x or y event - to the flower show or the library event?

Talking about publicity campaigns and a marketing plan, how about our esteemed Library Association? Two years ago we had a National Library Week and despite the slow cranking up of the old engine, to my surprise and perhaps to its own, The Library Association delivered some of the goods. The profile was raised, the media did get interested and the opinion making newspapers wrote hundreds of column inches about libraries. Local activities were run and promoted by the hundred and no doubt everyone here was involved. Channel 4 even dramatised some excerpts from novels on the back of the National Library Week promotion. All over the country, libraries got new and positive coverage for their services and for events and promotions linked to the theme. The Library Association preened itself and the Library Association Record published photos and items for a couple of issues. Then what happened - The Library Association reviewed the whole episode and concluded that it had been a major success but that the effort and energy it had devoted to getting it off the ground was all too much and that the poor overworked darlings could not contemplate another one for years to come. Great. So all the effort creating and establishing media contacts with press, radio and television is wasted. It will all have to be started from scratch again in x years time when The Library Association thinks it is recovered from the effort of doing the first National Library Week. This is crazy and I wrote to Ridgemount Street saying so. As they have not changed their opinion, we in London at least went ahead with a London Library Week in 1994. This year we will be launching one in October and it is designed to keep libraries in the forefront of public awareness. London Library Week is a campaign designed to celebrate and promote what we have, what we are and what we achieve, it is not a campaign to winge about what bad times we are having. It is crucially important that the library establishment should understand that moaning about what we have lost is an irrelevance to most people - hyping, yes even hyping, what we have and what we can and could do is the way to get public support. Millions of people have lost their jobs or lost their job security as a result of political changes in the past few years, and librarians have to demonstrate the value of what they do, if they are to have any chance of survival.

I would like to say a few words about a current debate being carried on in Branch Lines, the journal of the London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association. Brent Libraries have won and received a number of awards for their library service in the past few years - Farries/LA Press and Public Relations Awards spring to mind immediately. Brent have suffered repeated cuts in their bookfund in recent years and the criticism being made by The Library Association of Brent Libraries in the journal is that the press and PR is just window dressing, mere fluff and the real test of quality in a library service is linked very closely to book purchasing resources and staff skills, competence and customer care.

Brent's line is that they do not allow financial limitations to become an excuse for inactivity. I believe we should be commending not attacking Brent because the library service has striven to deliver service improvements and improve its image in the teeth of adversity - I know if I were a member of Brent Council I would be more inclined to support the funding of a service that has increased its customer base and won local and national recognition for its efforts rather than a service that just moaned about lack of resources.

Don't be afraid of gimmicks. The worst thing that can happen is that they fail but in the process you will have raised the profile of the service.

Sutton's large blue umbrellas in the days of Tory Sutton and deepest Thatcherism carried the slogan 'Don't be wet use Sutton Libraries'. This scheme got endless column inches in the professional press including a cover photograph on The Library Association Record of the Borough Librarian presenting an umbrella to the Minister for Arts. On the demise of the Conservatives in Sutton a new umbrella with a new slogan and a new colour scheme greeted the arrival of the Liberal Democrats. I have toyed with and rejected 'Keep Your Barnet Dry' as a slogan for my library service.

I asked my friend, the well-lunched Head of Press and Public Relations in Barnet, what he felt was the one most important thing to publicise about libraries and he quickly and unequivocally said 'the opening hours'. If residents do not know you are open they cannot visit you.

MARKET RESEARCH
You cannot know too much about your customer base and you do not know enough. Consumer surveys can be very illuminating. Two and a half years ago we surveyed 8,000 Barnet residents to seek their views on the library opening hours. We got a response that indicated that the existing pattern of opening hours, particularly late evenings, needed to be changed. There were dire warnings expressed by some staff who just knew that the public would not turn out on, say, a Friday evening at their local library. We gritted our teeth and implemented the changes the market research had indicated, successfully argued the case for longer opening hours at 12 of our 17 libraries and the status quo at the other five. The outcome was that the loans for the next year were increased by 17% and Barnet now loans more stock than any other London Borough. The other result of the survey revealed that a majority of the 8,000 surveyed were in favour of Sunday afternoon opening of libraries, and in three district areas of Barnet: Golders Green, Edgware and Hendon about 70% of those surveyed wanted to see a library opened on a Sunday afternoon. We must implement this desire if we are to lay claim to being a responsive, customer led service. I commend those authorities who have undertaken market research and tailored their hours to demand and need. I was interested to read that Sutton, which opened on Sundays earlier in the year, has found that their Sunday afternoon opening is almost as busy as Saturday, and that a new market has been established; the typical Sunday afternoon visitors are the extended family on a leisure outing. I commend Brent and Wandsworth and other authorities' opening of reference and study centres on Sundays and I hope that in due course many others will follow suit so that we can demonstrate our relevance and willingness to provide what the customer needs.

Most local authorities have set up consultation forums in the past few years. These can be an invaluable method of finding out what your customers are looking for in their libraries. In a market research study we undertook we found a very significant proportion of our customers are looking for some form of refreshment to be available when they visit the library. When we think about the long hours that students and the elderly spend in our libraries this is not surprising, but how many libraries accommodate this very basic need?

As a variation on consultation forms how many library services have a 'Friends of the Library' organisation. In Barnet our Friends organisation fundraises for library improvements, they have purchased three minicom telephones for us and a coffee lounge for a branch library. Members have contributed their opinions to the Department for National Heritage about privatisation of the service and gave their views on the Public Library Review.

We actually have two Friends of the Libraries organisations, a borough wide body and one that exists to support a small local branch library. They lobby for the service far more nakedly than any officer of the council would ever dare to do, writing to Members of the Council and the government, the local press and media, supporting us in our work. If you do not have one, go out and get one - they are worth their weight in gold!

A literary lunch, supper or tea is an ideal event to launch a Friends of the Library organisation, for once you can genuinely have a partnership with library supplier, bookseller, publisher and author. It affords a chance to show off your library, create goodwill, publicity and respect for the library service. I once attended a baked beans and jelly lunch and tea for 50 under 5's in a branch library to fit in with a picture book promotion. It was hilarious but more than a touch messy on the carpet.

Not everything works - all the market research tells us that the people who borrow books from libraries and those who buy are one and the same person. It seemed entirely sensible therefore to look to have a bookshop in a library so we looked for some redundant space in our largest library. We demolished some partition offices just inside the entrance to the library and created 300 sq ft of prime space which we advertised as a bookshop. One of our then suppliers, a paperback company, bid to operate the book shop - shelved the space, brought in the stock, and engaged the staff. We launched the shop, got coverage in the local paper and the Bookseller, and congratulated ourselves on a good idea and a job well done. It didn't work. The library public walked into the shop alright but then walked out again. We gritted our teeth and the bookseller muttered darkly, and we planned for a big push for Christmas. Sadly the paperback wholesaler went into receivership and our little retail shop was closed down by the men in grey suits, the stock was repossessed and the staff fired. Just recently we have let the shop again to a small local businessman who is offering books for sale but is also bidding to be a lottery outlet. He is convinced that the profit he will get from the lottery sales will be sufficient to underpin the bookshop in the first difficult months, we will see and I wish him luck.

ADVERTISING
Advertising the library service is usually very hit and miss and is always expensive. David Ogilvy said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted and the trouble is I don't know which half." I believe you will get more benefit from looking for mutually beneficial promotions where money does not necessarily change hands than you ever will from buying space in the media. After all Stephen Leacock described advertising as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it!

An example of a mutually beneficial advertising scheme is one we have just concluded in Barnet. An Asian radio station in London wrote asking whether we were interested in their airwaves to promote reading or anything else. Instead of buying airtime at £60 for 3 seconds we have agreed a mutually beneficial deal whereby we print new book labels for the 10,000 or so books in Asian languages we hold in our libraries and give the radio station a part of the label to advertise their existence to their target audience. Obviously every time the books are loaned the customer will see the advert and probably check the label again to see when the book is due back before returning the book. The advert remains for the life of the book in the library. In exchange the library service will get a number of free radio slots to advertise services to ethnic minorities, library promotions, etc - the package being worth some thousands of pounds but as a mutual beneficial barter no money will change hands. Clearly there is potential here for other library stock categories. I suspect it would not be difficult to identify an advertiser who would find the book labels of all the children's stock in your libraries very attractive. I believe the only problem here is choosing an advertiser that you and your local authority are content to be linked with and then determining what the package is worth, but that is just another problem to be overcome.

We are also about to rent out space in a library, under-used space I hasten to add, for a public computer centre on the lines of the successful model introduced by Westminster in Marylebone. The idea is to work in partnership with a company who will provide 12 or so PCs, Apple Macs, software packages, word processing, photocopying, and desk top publishing with full training for the man or woman in the street to use at an hourly rental. The facility will give access to the Internet and to a range of hardware and training that we in the Barnet library service could not hope to match because of the lack of investment capital and training expertise. Judging by the experience of Marylebone Library this venture will be tremendously popular and we will be seeking safeguards to ensure the facility is available at affordable prices. There is a real marketing synergy here and I expect the creation of this public access computer centre, eventually I imagine in more than one library, will lead to greater awareness of the two Open for Learning centres and the new CD-ROM lending service we are about to launch.

This provision will also give us a stake in the future. It should address at least in part the feeling among many library customers that the library service has been left behind in the information technology explosion.

Unlike video lending where most libraries came in late and tentatively to the business, computer centres and CD-ROM lending outlets are not on every high street. If we seize the opportunity we can create a market and hold on to the customers by providing a valuable and important facility that reinforces our market position in the leisure information and communications business.

PUBLICATIONS
Your publishing programme is likely to be largely about local history but with imagination it can give you some wonderful opportunities to promote your service. Some authorities have produced an I Spy Book of their area which appeals particularly to young people and schools, it stimulates interest in the area, and helps develop a sense of local pride and belonging.

The whole publications programme should be assessed against objectives to maximise the contribution publications can make to your marketing strategy, and to your council's tourism strategy. It is another tool to help deliver the council's corporate plan.

PACKAGING AND PRESENTATION
Librarians do not usually make hard taskmasters. We are too nice, and we are prey to the contractor sharks out there. It is my observation that our libraries are often grubby, even dirty. Compulsory Competitive Tendering in the cleaning business is about a contractor putting in a price for a contract knowing that he will not have to deliver to the specification because the monitoring will be poor and the librarian will accept sob stories about his problems and promises to do better in future.

We would not allow this to be the case in our own homes but we develop a blind eye to a grubby, untidy, confused library because we are familiar with it and feel comfortable in the environment. Here is where a consultation forum or quality circle or similar set up can help - ask for feedback on the presentation of the library from your customers and listen to what they say. Have you ever been to a major store and seen it in the kind of disarray that is all too common in our libraries? I know we have less staffing but we too are dependent upon repeat business, and I know I vote with my feet if I have to use a store which is poorly presented and has an unhelpful layout and staff.

Local authorities now have published their complaints policies and have set corporate standards for answering telephones and standards for answering letters in a certain time. The library service needs to be the best in this field to demonstrate its commitment to the customer and its professionalism to the councillors and rest of the council departments.

I do not think libraries should be, and ever will be, uniform like Marks and Spencer stores, a large part of the charm and attraction of libraries is in the variety of buildings and idiosyncrasies. However, we should seize the best features of layout, design, attention to detail and customer care from the retail sector.

I said the word uniform which prompts the following observations. My friend the public relations officer says to me "one of the things I feel lets your service down is that so many library staff look scruffy." I denied this, as no doubt you would, and I tell him it is a subjective judgement, that library staff are poorly paid, it is a dirty job, etc. But in my heart I know and you know that he has a point. It is a little bit of freedom we allow ourselves, a little bit of safe rebellion, but it is damaging our professional image in the eyes of the public and our colleagues. Uniforms seem to be an anathema, we are not sheep to be corralled, but I believe they may be the only way to improve standards.

I had the same initial reaction to the idea of wearing a name badge but I am now fully accustomed to it and I feel it has helped to break down barriers at meetings with the public. Why were we all issued with a name badge today unless there is a need?

You can of course overdo customer care initiatives. In the late 60s I worked in Buckinghamshire as a lending librarian in Amersham. Part of my job was to serve customers who were picking up their reserved books and these were filed behind the counter by reader's name and address. It was a busy library and this was a routine task. As a sociable soul, I set myself the target of finding something to say to anyone who queued at my desk. One day a large, fur-coated, beringed county woman with a booming voice presented me with her reservation card. I turned it over, read her surname and glanced at the address, found and handed her the books and said to her "Pigpen, what a wonderful house name, if I ever have a house I'd call it Pigpen too." She fixed me with a stare that could have welded metal and boomed "Pippen if you don't mind!" After that I retreated back to "good morning" for a while.

I was asked to say whether marketing is a truly dirty work for librarians. It may be for some of you but in my view it can be an effective tool to preserve, develop and expand the service we all love and believe in.

Martyn Kempster is Controller of Libraries/Deputy Director of Education, London Borough of Barnet.