Doing the background work

Step one on the marketing planning journey is to ask yourself - Where are you now? Where you are now is a function of where you've been.

This is where you get to sit back and reflect on where your library has been in the last planning period or beyond and documenting the influence of the past on your future direction. This includes specifying:

1. Values, vision and mission statements - which outline, in broad terms, what you have been doing, why and how you have been doing it, as well as where you are going in the future.


2. Description/History of your library - in broad general terms.


3. Key Performance Indicators - the description/history in statistical terms.


4. Reasons for producing the plan - the intention and outcomes, spelled out in clear terms, for producing the plan.

Again, it's all about asking yourself the right questions to set up a solid foundation to build your future on.

1. Values, vision and mission statements

• What are your library’s core values?
• What is your library’s vision?
• What is your library’s mission?

If you have values, vision and mission statements, then include them here to set the scene for your plan. If you don’t have your own, then you can use those of your parent organization or you can create your own. There is a range of sites that can help you with ideas for creating these statements as well as examples of them from other libraries.

2. Description/History of your library

• Who are you? (Organization)
• Where are you? (Distribution)
• What do you do? (Products and services)
• What have you achieved? (Milestones)
• What is your financial situation? (Finance/budget)
• What is your staffing situation? (Staffing)
• What are you really good at? (USP)

Set the scene for your marketing plan with a very brief description and history of your library. Include details like:

• Organization - Your library’s place in the council’s organisational structure - an organisation chart is useful.
• Distribution - Number, location and hours of service points - a map helps.
• Products and services - The main products and services that your library provides - perhaps a matrix of product/services by branch.
• Milestones - Significant milestones in your library’s history, e.g. when and where each service point opened, when particular service initiatives began (e.g. computerisation, special collections and services...) - a timeline would help.
• Finance/Budget - including: yearly budget over the past 5-10 years, grant funding, revenue raising activities etc. Is the situation improving, declining, static? How does this compare with other public libraries? - graphs and charts can help to communicate the meaning of the numbers.
• Staffing - including: no. of FTE (full time equivalent) staff (full time, part time, casual, librarians, library technicians, library assistants). Is the situation improving, declining, static? How does this compare with other public libraries? - again, graphs and charts can help to communicate the meaning of the numbers.
• USP (Unique selling points) - Anything unique about your library's service offerings? - don't forget pictures, remember the old adage about one picture being worth a thousand words.

3. Key Performance Indicators

• What are your KPIs?
• How have you performed over the past 5 or 10 years?
• Do you want to maintain or improve performance?

List your library's Key Performance Indicators. Summarise your library’s performance on these indicators over the last 5-10 years. Compare them to other public libraries - charts and graphs communicate well. Indicate the factors that are affecting your performance, positively or negatively.

If you are over or under achieving the standards for your KPIs, does this mean that

- the standards need to be changed?
- the performance needs to be changed?
- the indicators need to be changed?
- nothing needs to be done?

4. Reasons for producing the plan

• What is your intention/s for creating this plan?
• What outcomes do you hope to achieve by producing it?
• What time period will the plan cover?

Public libraries have not always felt the need to have marketing plans. It is important, from the beginning, to know and understand what your purpose is in preparing this plan. Here's two possible reasons to be going through the strategic planning process.

1. Meet corporate objectives - From the council's planning documents there should be some organisational goals/objectives/outcomes that your library is a part of the strategy to achieve.



2. Meet library objectives - Some of the general reasons that you might have for embarking on this planning process might be to:

- Focus on what is important
- Set clear direction and goals
- Set performance standards and measures
- Continuously improve your performance
- Involve and motivate staff- Respond to new challenges
- Respond to market research insights

A first up strategic marketing plan should tie in with your library's other planning documents as well as your parent council’s strategic and management planning timetable. Council strategic plans are usually over 4 years. Action plans for any given year will flow from an initial strategic marketing plan.

Whatever the reasons for doing it – know them, record them, evaluate them at the end of the plan's lifespan.

Sources of information

There's a range of information that you need to complete this section. Here's a few suggestions on where to get it.

• Your council's planning and policy documents
• Your library’s planning and policy documents
• Your library’s local studies collection for basic historical and descriptive information about your library.
• Your library's internal statistical data.
• Your library’s statistical returns for your State’s Public Library Statistics records
• NSW public library statistics for comparative information about other public libraries
• Other state’s public library statistics for comparative information about other public libraries.

Be ruthlessly honest, objective yet diplomatic in your appraisal of your past. At all times, we're all doing the best we can with the resources we have available both external material resources and internal psychological resources. The point here is not to brighten or darken the past. It is to illuminate the path to the future.

What's the structure and content of a marketing plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. There's a lot of little pieces that have to be found and put together to make a coherent big picture. It can take a while to get all those pieces identified and in position, but when it's done, the final picture will look compelling.

A Marketing plan focusses on getting and keeping customers and the marketing programs for doing it. It still answers the three fundamental questions of strategic planning, which we've already explored:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. How will we get there?

These overlay the underlying structure of a marketing plan which is built around the marketing process of:

* Analysis - of marketing opportunities and the attendant researching of target markets.
* Planning - of marketing objectives and programs or strategies.
* Implementation - the organizing and putting into action the marketing programs.
* Control - the monitoring, measuring and evaluating of the success or otherwise of the marketing programs

Here's the basic structure and content which we will explore in more detail in future posts.

Where are we now?

ANALYSIS

1. Executive summary – Presents a brief overview of the plan. This appears first in the plan but is actually prepared last, after all of the following.

2. Background – Presents brief history/description of the library (including KPIs and financial situation), its mission, vision and values statements and the reasons for producing the plan.

3. Current marketing situation analysis– presents relevant background data on current external and internal environments.

External environment - external forces and trends that pose opportunities and threats to your library including:

• demographic
• economic
• political/legal
• environmental
• social/cultural
• technological

Internal environment - internal marketing skills and knowledge and industry trends in those capabilities that highlight strengths and weaknesses in your library in the following areas:

• customers (including size and growth of market; customer characteristics, perceptions, behaviours, needs)
• products/services (including their pricing)
• promotion
• distribution channels
• competition (including competitor characteristics, comparison, strengths and weaknesses, objectives, strategies, evaluation)
• publics (including any group that has an actual or potential interest in, or impact on, your library's ability to achieve its objectives - financial, media, government, citizen action, local, general and internal publics.)

4. SWOT and issues analysis – identifies, with relevance to your library service, the main

• strengths/weaknesses
• opportunities/threats
• issues identified from the SWOT's matching of strengths and weaknesses to opportunities and threats
• key planning assumptions
• critical success factors
• key result areas

Where do we want to be?

PLANNING

5. Goals and objectives – Defines the plan’s financial and marketing goals,
• linked to the broader organizational mission statement,
• expressed as measurable objectives in terms of- usage volume,- market share,- cost/revenue,- consumer awareness,- consumer satisfaction etc.

How will we get there?

6. Marketing strategy – Presents the broad marketing approach that will be used to achieve the plan’s objectives, i.e.
• the 4Ps of marketing
- Product/Service,
- Price,
- Place (or distribution)
- Promotion (or marketing communication)
• and other strategic options that serve the 4Ps, e.g.
- segmenting, targetting, positioning,
- market research, etc.

IMPLEMENTATION

7. Action programs – Presents the special marketing programs designed to achieve the business objectives.

8. Projected budget – Forecasts the plan’s expected budget inputs and financial outcomes.

CONTROL

9. Controls – Indicates how the plan will be monitored, measured and evaluated.

The model for the plan is based on the work of American marketing guru Philip Kotler, SC Johnson and Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, from the following books:

Kotler, Philip; Brown, Linden; Adam, Stewart and Armstrong, Gary, Marketing 6th ed. Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2004, pp 120-159

Andreasen, Alan R. and Kotler, Philip, Strategic Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, 1996, pp 100-101

There are many sites that can help you with marketing planning. Have a look at my del.icio.us bookmarks on planning to get you started. It's mostly about asking the right questions and then providing convincing, evidence based answers to them.

A bit of background history on the concept of marketing

Marketing didn't just emerge out of the blue. It's developed as society, business and organizations have developed. Organizations have used a range of orientations to their world over time, including the marketing concept which itself continues to evolve. Let's have a look at some of the other business orientations that have come before the marketing concept and also ones that are evolving from the marketing concept.

1. Production concept
2. Product concept
3. Selling concept
4. Marketing concept
5. Societal marketing concept
6. Experience concept

1. Production concept

The organization believes that consumers will buy products that are widely available and low in cost. So managers focus on achieving high production efficiency and wide distribution. Remember Henry Ford? You can have it in black, black or black. Not much need for customer input here. Just build it and they'll come, if it does the job and is reasonably priced. Historically, this approach begins with the industrial revolution and had its heyday until the beginning of the Great Depression. Some companies (and some libraries?) still believe this.

2. Product concept

The organization believes that consumers will buy products that offer the best quality, performance or innovative features. Managers focus on making the best products and constantly improving them, whether customers want them or not. The focus is on engineers and things rather than customers and solutions to their problems. I get the feeling that some tech companies (and some libraries?) are still a bit like this.

3. Selling concept

The organization believes that consumers, unless stimulated will not buy enough of the organizations products. So managers focus on an aggressive selling and promotion effort. From the time of the Great Depression, simply producing a product, or even producing a better product, wasn't enough. The 'hard sell' was required in an increasingly competitive marketplace. I don't know that too many public libraries ever had the luxury of enough money (running a sales force is expensive!) to adopt this view, but I'll bet many of you have come across companies that still treat you like this. The advent of a much more informed consumer society where people are much more 'savvy' about business practices makes this way a real turn off for most customers. Even some used car companies (a few? a couple? there must be?) have worked that one out!

4. Marketing concept

The organization believes that achieving its goals is best achieved by integrating its marketing activities, more effectively than its competitors, towards identifying and satisfying the needs and wants of target markets. Here managers focus on marketing, rather than selling, which influences all company planning. This stage began in Australia towards the end of the 1960's. Not many public libraries that I've come across have reached this stage yet. Some think they are there. Some are trying and are on the way. The customer becomes the focus here. I know that's a bit of a cliché, but that's what it's all about.

5. Societal marketing concept

The organization still has its marketing orientation but tries to do it in a socially, ethically and environmentally rsponsible way. This way has a more long term sustainable emphasis. Managers focus on the quality of life that they deliver to their customers in an attempt to build long term profitable and mutually advantageous relationships with them. This stage developed out of the social and economic conditions of the 1970s and 1980s. I think most public librarians that I know would be aspiring to this type of marketing. With the trend towards sustainability and triple bottom line reporting, I think this fits in well with the aims of our parent organizations and the communities that we serve.

6. Experience concept

This goes beyond marketing of goods and services to the point where companies use services as the stage and goods as the props to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. Think about it. Once you get beyond price, what is the difference between the retail outlets that you use and the ones that you don't? Is it a combination of its closeness to your work/home, opening hours, the ease of getting around the aisles, the space, the range of goods on sale, the service of the staff, the safety and convenience of the shopping centre and the car parking and a myriad of other factors that contribute to the overall 'experience'? Think about the 'experiences' that your customers have in your public library and the factors that contribute to them. Is every 'experience' that they have of your library a memorable event?

If you want to find out more about these approaches, check out the references below.

Kotler, Philip, Marketing 6th ed. Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2004. p 18-22,402-404

Stanton, William J et al, Fundamentals of marketing, 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, Roseville, NSW 1992. p 16-18)

Pine, B.Joseph II and Gilmore, James H, Welcome to the experience economy, Harvard Business Review, July/August, 1998, pp 97-105.

Pine, B.Joseph II and Gilmore, James H, The Experience economy: Work is theatre and every business a stage, Harvard Business School Publishing, 1999,

Schmitt, Bernd H, Experiential marketing: How to get customers to sense, feel, think, act, relate to your company brands, The Free Press, NY, 1999.)

What's the difference between vision, mission and values statements?

The terminology can get a bit confusing here, sometimes, especially if it is used interchangably by some people.

There's also a lot of cynicism about these statements. If yours are anything like the Dilbert example above, then cynicism is the correct and appropriate response. Yes, they can be boring, bland and meaningless, especially in a government context. The combination of one managementspeak cliche after another can obfuscate rather than illuminate the pathway ahead.

However, if you can do your own with your library team, then it's up to you how meaningful or meaningless they become, how useful or useless they become. If done well, then there can be no doubt about who you are, what you stand for, where you are going and how you are going to get there.

The real challenge is not so much in creating them, as in living up to them. We're all only human. We will fail at times to live up to them. If they are worthy of achievement, then we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and try harder to achieve them next time. I think its worth the effort.

In general terms the difference between these three strategic statements is:

Vision - sets the broad, long term direction, purpose and goals of the organization.
Mission - describes the path to reaching it.
Values - are the guidelines for day to day activity on this path

All need to be clear, concise and memorable so that they focus and motivate employees, steer their actions and inform their decisions. Managers need to make sure that everyone in their team understands what the vision, mission and values mean, not only for the organization as a whole but for them personally.

According to Kris Cole, together, an organization’s vision, mission and values achieve six things:

1. Help the organization position itself in the marketplace
2. Help employees focus on what’s important
3. Provide a framework for the business plan
4. Guide day to day activities and act as a reference point for decision making
5. Send a clear message to all stakeholders about:
   - who the organization is
   - what it stands for
   - what it will achieve in broad terms
   - how it will achieve it


6. Enhance an organization’s reputation and help it attract like minded employees.

(Cole Kris , Management: Theory and practice, 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2005, p 452)

Here's a bit more detail to differentiate these important strategic statements. We'll use the vision, mission and values statements produced by Toastmasters International as examples.

Vision statement - Where are we headed?

The key questions to ask yourself here are:

1. What, in broad terms do we do?
2. What do we aspire to become in the future?

A Vision Statement should:

* express what the organization truly wants and cares about
* provide a clear picture of what everyone is striving to achieve
* unify employees by defining an enterprise’s fundamental purpose
* provide a starting point for moving forward and help the organization assess its progress and respond to change
* challenge, stretch and inspire people so they know their effort is worthwhile.

Toastmasters International

"Toastmasters International empowers people to achieve their full potential and realise their dreams. Through our member clubs, people throughout the world can improve their communication and leadership skills, and find the courage to change."

(Cole Kris , Management: Theory and practice, 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2005, p 451)

Mission statement - How will we get there?

Peter Drucker says the fundamental questions to ask when preparing mission statements are:

1. What is our business?
2. Who is the customer?
3. What is value to the customer?
4. What will our business be?
5. What should our business be?

(Kotler, Philip, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control, 9th ed. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, 1997. p 68)

The mission underpins the vision and describes how it will be realized. This means that it needs to be more specific and reflect the organization’s standards in areas such as customer service, employee relations, product or service quality and reliability, and profitability.

Philip Kotler suggests that,

"Organisations develop mission statements to share them with their managers, employees, and customers. A well worked out mission statement provides company employees with a shared sense of purpose, direction and opportunity. The company mission statement acts as an 'invisible hand' that guides geographically dispersed employees to work independently and yet collectively toward realizing the organizations goals.

Good mission statements have three major characteristics:

1. Focus on a limited number of goals
2. Stress the major policies and values that the company wants to honour
3. Define the major competitive scopes within which the company will operate i.e.
- Industry scope
- Product and applications scope
- Competence scope
- Market segment scope
- Vertical (distribution channel) scope
- Geographical scope."

(Kotler, Philip, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning,Implementation and Control, 9th ed. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, 1997. p 69-70)

Toastmasters International

"Toastmasters International is the leading movement devoted to making effective oral communication a worldwide reality. Through its member clubs, Toastmasters International helps men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening and thinking - vital skills that promote self actualization, enhance leadership potential, foster human understanding, and contribute to the betterment of mankind. It is basic to this mission that Toastmasters International continually expand its worldwide network of clubs, thereby offering ever greater numbers of people the opportunity to benefit from its programs. "

Values statement - What do we stand for?

The key questions to aks here are:

1. What do we believe is important?
2. What are the internal principles that guide our actions and the behaviour of our employees?
3. What do we stand for?

An organizations values show it how to do business and respond to a crisis and shows its employees how to behave every day. They link with and support its vision.

Toastmasters International

"Toastmasters International’s core values are integrity, dedication to excellence, service to the member and respect for the individual. These are values worthy of a great organization, and we believe we should incorporate them as anchor points in every decision we make. Our core values provide us with a means of not only guiding but also evaluating our operations, our planning and our vision for the future."

(Cole Kris , Management: Theory and practice, 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2005, pp 449- 451)

The main issue here is creating a set of values that can be lived in practice by the staff and management of your library. If you create a set of values that cannot or will not be practiced by everyone in the organization then you create a jarring sense of incongruence in both customers and staff. Remember, the values are for everyone, management included.

These strategic statements are best developed in a team environment with your management team and staff. If people aren't involved in the process, then it's harder to get their commitment to them. If the personal values, visions and missions of the staff and the broader organisational ones are in congruence then people put much more energy and enthusiasm into the organisation.

So be careful and be honest. You will need vision, mission and values statements to guide your business/marketing plan. If you don’t have them from your parent organization or if you want to develop your own, in alignment with them, there are many sites that can help you to create them.

Just for fun. You've earned it!

If you want to have a bit of fun, try

* the Corporate mission statement generator,
* the Evil genius mission generator
* the Mission Statement Generator (MSG that's good for you) for the busy executive.
* the John Haworth mission statement generator, which even has categories of mission statements like to the point, punchy, reasonable, boring and insane.
* the Peter Talbot mission statement generator which has 5,159,780,352 possible different statements just by refreshing the page.
* and, of course, the ultimate, the Dilbert mission statement generator.

and that's only from the first two pages of a Google search on mission statement generator.

What's the difference between strategic planning and strategic marketing planning?

I used to get really confused about that, so I made a point of investigating the concepts and educating myself about them when I did my Marketing Diploma. I didn't want to end up like Dilbert's manager, above. i.e. a complete dill. Let's see what the experts have to say and then see what that means for public libraries.

According to Philip Kotler, strategic planning is undertaken at a number of levels depending on the size and structure of the organization. For the most complex organizations a hierarchy of strategies is required.

1. Corporate level (Corporate strategy)
2. Strategic Business Unit (SBU) level (Business strategy)
3. Functional level of SBU (Marketing strategy, Research & development strategy, Production & operations strategy, Finance & administration strategy, Human resources strategy)

1. Corporate strategy
involves decision making to:
* Define the corporate mission and vision
* Set objectives
* Define business portfolio strategy
* Deploy Resources
* Establish corporate values

2. Business strategy
involves decision making to:
* Define the business
* Set objectives
* Choose the product/market portfolio
* Establish competitive strategy
* Allocate and manage resources

3. Functional level strategy
involves decision making to develop:
* Marketing strategy - marketing goals and objectives, marketing strategies (customer, product/services, pricing, promotion and distribution)
* Research & Development strategy - technology, product development.
* Production and Operations strategy
* Finance and Administration strategy
* Human resources strategy

Kotler, Philip; Brown, Linden; Adam, Stewart and Armstrong, Gary, Marketing 6th ed. Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest NSW, 2004, pp 78-83

Public Library Strategic Plans

At the corporate level, your council's strategic plan will set the scope within which your public library will operate. Most importantly, it’ll define the council's vision and mission which your public library will be helping to achieve. It’ll also set out the structure of the organization, into directorates or divisions that is designed to best achieve this vision and mission.

At the business level, the broad concerns of the strategic plan are broken down into smaller units. These may be called business units, departments or whatever terminology your council uses.

From the business unit level, smaller functional units may be created.

Depending on the size of your local council and how it is structured, your public library could fit into the business unit or functional level of an SBU. If it's large enough to be a business unit, then, within the Strategic Business Plan, it could develop an overall Strategic Marketing Plan for the library and/or separate Marketing Plans for each product/service. In either case, the planning process is the same.

* create or reiterate a vision and mission that you are trying to achieve
* engage in rigorous situation analysis
* set goals and objectives to achieve
* design strategies to achieve these goals and objectives
* specify action plans, including budgets, for implementing these strategies
* specify feedback and control mechanisms for monitoring the implementation of the plans

A public library is dependent for its direction on the goals and objectives of higher levels of the organization. It pays to be aware of these higher level goals and objectives because, technically, they set the parameters within which the public library operates. At each level, the vision and mission can be further refined, if desired, so that your library can establish its own vision and mission. The main thing to remember when doing this is that it should fit well with the council's vision and mission. The current buzzword is that it should be “in alignment with” the council’s vision and mission.

Local Government Strategic Plans in NSW tend to be of 4 years duration, so your Business and Marketing Plans should mirror this. Within your Strategic Marketing Plan, your Action Plans can be organised on a yearly basis to create Annual Marketing Plans to mirror your council's yearly Management Plan.

Having done this, don't forget, these are living documents reflecting the real world. The real world changes, sometimes unpredictably, so be prepared to change your plans if necessary. If you've done your initial research well and created clear detailed documents, then any changes should be easy to incorporate.

Here are some examples of Public Library Strategic Plans and Marketing Plans. If you know of any more that you think would be useful here, by all means let me know and I will add them.

Here are some sites on planning in general that you may find useful, too.

Software

There is a range of software available to help you with business and marketing planning. Here’s a few that you might want to check out.

Masterplan Professional, CCH
Marketing Plan Pro, Palo Alto Software
BIZ Plan Freeware. This is a FREE Business Plan Guide and Template. The Word-based Template contains a detailed framework and structure for writing a business plan. It’s complemented by a comprehensive guide.

What the hell is marketing?

Well, marketing certainly isn't fraud if done in a socially, ethically and environmentally responsible way. Dilbert and his engineer mates see marketers as the enemy and, sometimes, I think librarians do, too. My impression is that some public librarians also don't understand what marketing really is. Many use the terms marketing and promotion interchangeably. Marketing is not promotion. Promotion is a part of marketing. It's one of the 4Ps of marketing, which are:

* Product (which includes services, too)
* Price
* Place (or distribution)
* Promotion

Some people say that the 4Ps are out of date but I think that they are still pretty useful. So do most writers and researchers in marketing.

So marketing is about a lot more than promotion. It's about creating, pricing, distributing and promoting products and services for our customers. Let's start with my favourite definition of marketing.

"Find out what your customers want and deliver it to them profitably" (Auld, Malcolm, Direct marketing made easy. Cornstalk Harper Collins, Sydney, NSW 1999. p 6)

Short, sweet and spot on.

Let's have a look at a few more definitions of marketing.

"Marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and exchanging products of value with others." (Kotler, Philip, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control, 9th ed. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, 1997. p 14)

"Marketing - the systematic planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products." (Bradmore, Don, Australian Marketing Dictionary, Macstyle, Hampton Victoria, 1990. p 112)

"What is marketing? The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably." [In our case cost-effectively]. (Chartered Institute of Marketing UK)

“Marketing is three things:
1. A set of activities such as identifying customers or markets, designing products or services for each, ensuring that these products or services are made available to them and monitoring the results.
2. A tool bag of different techniques and concepts which allow the marketing manager to complete these various processes. Like all tools each is useful for certain tasks.
3. A philosophy which becomes a culture within an organisation. The organisation and the individuals within it become customer driven, that is everything they do is concerned with providing markets/customers with what they want, at a price which they are willing to pay. (UK Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, 2002)

"Marketing can be described as all activities designed to generate and facilitate any exchange intended to satisfy human needs or wants." (Rix, Peter and Stanton, William J, Marketing: A practical approach, 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill, Roseville, NSW 1998. p 7)

"Marketing is a total system of business activities designed to plan, price, promote and distribute want satisfying products, services and ideas to target markets in order to achieve organisational objectives." (Stanton, William J et al, Fundamentals of marketing, 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, Roseville, NSW 1992. p 8)

Notice that word 'exchange' cropping up all the time? As librarians, we're probably thinking of the exchange of money for goods and services. Certainly, our customers are doing that. They have already exchanged money for their 'free' public library in their rates and taxes and also exchange money for 'value added' services, too. But the crucial exchange these days, in the public and private sectors, is the exchange of the customer's time and effort for not only goods and services, but the experience of acquiring them.

The experience of the customer in dealing with an organization is often the only differentiating factor between competing offers. The convenience, the simplicity, the positive memorability of the experience is what customers are willing to exchange for their precious time.

We could go on and on with even more definitions, but I think you get the idea. Marketing's a lot more than just promotion, isn't it?

What is Marketing Management?

Once you know what marketing is, it's time to do it. That means the ongoing management of all the functions that are marketing, or as Philip Kotler defines it:

"Marketing Management is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals."(Kotler, Philip, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control, 9th ed. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, 1997. p 15)

i.e. marketing in action!

More on that in posts to come.

So, just who is Pete and what can he possibly know about marketing libraries?

I thought I'd start this blog to share my knowledge and experience of marketing in general and in a public library context. My impression is that marketing is generally confused by librarians with promotion. There is a lot more to marketing than promotion, which I will explain and elucidate in this blog. I'll also provide you with some useful practical marketing tips and, hopefully, some fun and frivolity along the way.

My background is in public libraries in NSW. I've worked in them for the past 30 years starting as a library assistant and progressing through a range of librarian positions.

I've developed and managed marketing research and planning projects, promotional programs and events, including programs and services that have been designed to recover their outgoing costs and generate revenue. I'm a bit of a marketing tragic as you can see from my del.icio.us bookmarks

.

I'm also a part time TAFE teacher of management and marketing. Academically, I've done a bit, and I'm still learning:

* Graduate Certificate in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)
* Interstrength Accreditation
* Certificate IV in Workplace Assessment and Training
* Diploma in Marketing Management, Winner of the TAFE State Medal
* Certificate IV in Team Leadership, Winner of the TAFE State Medal
* MBTI Accreditation
* Graduate Diploma in Librarianship
* Bachelor of Arts majoring in English and Australian literature and modern European history.

If you want to know anything else about me, just ask.