Developing Strategic Marketing Plans That Really Work: A Toolkit for Public Libraries

Citation

Calvert, P. (2007), "Developing Strategic Marketing Plans That Really Work: A Toolkit for Public Libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 114-115. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710729164

Perhaps one of the most misunderstood topics in the wide field of management is that of marketing. How often practitioners regard marketing as a soft topic, easy to do and so not one they need to study. This is totally incorrect. Marketing is not only promotion, it's more than a few‐hand made signs on the walls of the library and some poorly designed leaflets left on the tables. To be done properly marketing requires, at the very least, a complete understanding of the nature of the organisation's operations, especially the four Ps of product, place, price, and promotion. That can be learned from a number of useful text already available, especially Marketing Concepts for Libraries and Information Services, by de Saez (Facet, 2002). Kendrick, perhaps because he once worked as a public librarian, and is now a marketing consultant, realised that there was a place for a book that converts theory into practice.

It is unusual to see the word “ambition” used so frequently in a book about marketing, but that is one of Kendrick's themes; good marketing starts with ambition. Ambition, he says, gives a clear weighting to each activity we conduct, and without a sense of what we most earnestly want to achieve, marketing activities will become just a set of uncoordinated events. Hence a particularly important part of this book is the section on “How to write a statement of ambition for your public library”, which commences on page 22. The statement of ambition sits at the confluence of the organisations stated vision/mission, the policies of parent institutions, and the quantified objectives that the library needs to achieve. In later chapters Kendrick discusses the market for public library services, and how to discover more about this by market research to help in the creation of a community profile. He goes to describe how the market can be segmented and a value proposition written for each segment. Unfortunately there is little specific about marketing digital library services, although the techniques will work for any public library service.

This is a very practical book. It includes 20 templates the author has developed for use with the book (the templates are also available for download from Facet's website). This book really achieves what many others set out to do but do not manage so capably, that is, to be a really practical guide to a complex matter. It is one of the best books on marketing for librarians to be published in recent years and I recommend it to practitioners. I also recommend it to LIS faculty teaching marketing, for despite its non‐theoretical content it is still a valuable text.