Recession-Friendly Library Market Research: Service Learning with Benefits

Chesnut, Mary Todd (2011) “Recession-Friendly Library Market Research:Service Learning with Benefits“, Journal of Library Innovation vol 2. no 1. pp.61-71

In this article, Chesnut profiles a very clever collaborative project her W. Frank Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University embarked on with their university Business school. Forming a committee to look at library marketing, they decided they needed a bit of a marketing makeover, and since they had no money for a consultant, they invited the marketing students at their university to do it for them.

I think this is a super idea, once you get over the cringe factor at the library management’s cheapness. In fact, if you take it as written that library management everywhere are more likely than not to be stingy when it comes to marketing/PR for libraries, inviting students with marketing theoretical knowledge is a far better idea than librarians doing it themselves…

For instance, no student who wasn't smoking superglue-laced rollies would ever have come up with "Librarians Go Gaga"

Libraries do user-created marketing all the time. The “3-minute YouTube Library Overview” style contest has run at many libraries over the last few years, and libraries I know of have tried everything from these to student testimonials, student library ambassadors (and their blogs) and “Why the library gets me good grades” essay contests, 99% of which are undersubscribed to almost to the point of students’ complete ignorance of them.

Chesnut and her library were lucky in that there was a precedent for this sort of thing at her University – students had done assessable marketing plans for other service departments on campus, so adding themselves to the list seemed relatively trouble-free. For those of us who aren’t so lucky, here are the main hurdles:

• Management buy-in. Library management in universities seem to suffer a terrible case of “Little Sister Syndrome” – desperate to help with other people’s projects and take on their chores, but when help is offered or potential help made apparent, the bottom lip comes out and “No, we can do it ourselves” comes out. This is a deeper problem than I have an answer for here – but good luck, and my heartiest congratulations to Chestnut and any other librarians who manage to convince their executives that it’s okay to let someone else do something for you, it’s probably good for them too and selfishly driven so it’s not about to shatter any of your philosophies about the way the world works.
• Lecturer buy-in. It’s probably a lot more work to administer and assess a live and in-progress marketing campaign than it is the canned static imaginary marketing plans which seem to be standard fare in these sorts of courses. So many lecturers probably just aren’t going to be sold on the extra work (real or percieved). There may also be the problem that the lecturer themselves isn’t a library fan – not active dislike, but one of those types who’s never set foot in the building in his whole life, sets textbook-based assessment, and is of the opinion that the library’s really just there for liberal arts students to keep all their wishy-washy philosophy books in. They may find it a bit of a stretch to begin a relationship with the library with them being asked to do something out of the ordinary, especially if it wasn’t their idea. If you’ve got a super-keen library-loving type, you could float the idea, but only if you knew they had an existing assessment item which was very similar, and only if the course and assessment were being reviewed already. I’d probably shy away from informing the Dean of the business school to start with, in case you have one of those types who might see it as excellent revenue raising for the school…
• Student buy-in. This kind of live marketing campaing wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do. There aren’t copies out there on the internet to purchase and then submit with minimal changes as your own work, like there are with traditional marketing plans. It’s also tricky for those with a purely theoretical knowledgew of marketing to create an appropriate campaign for an out-of-the-ordinary corporate client like the library. Plus, it’s hard to make the library appealing for students (especially if they’ve not made much use of it during their studies so far, as many students in Business tend not to)
• Trust. A lot of librarians have a LOT of trouble letting go of their library brand. A lot of librarians might also be very nervous about what the students might come up with, and fear that it might not be quite what the library would like to say about itself. Plus, these are students, and there might be quite a difference in quality between work of a Pass grade standard and what the library expects to get – how firm is the agreement to be? Should the library be required to use the marketing campaign the students come up with if they don’t like it, or don’t think it’s good enough (or doable?)

Good points of a plan like this one include:

• New ideas – not just ideas that the library hasn’t tried, but ideas that tie in with current cultural experiencesof target library users, use the latest marketing theories, and are up-to-date with technological trends users are experiencing.
• Students are likely to be a bit more “daring” in marketing than a panel of librarians might be. (Yes, I know that’s not necessarily a good thing – but at least if the students come up with something outrageous that the library won’t go for, they can then moot something a bit less extreme and have the library much more likely to say yes)

• If graded (and given a significant enough weighting in the overall grade of the course) there’s real incentive for the students to come up with something really creative, well-supported and workable.
• Academic librarians have been complaining for years that the library doesn’t feature embedded in enough coursework. Can’t really complain of that anymore once this ideas’s in place.

If there’s any negative comment I can make about Chesnut’s project, I must say that I was a bit disappointed that the student teams could only come up with interactive signage and more graduate library workshops. And that given the student feedback, the library proceeded to come up with Task Forces (read: committees) to “investigate” the ideas the students came up with, thereby pretty much ensuring that all the ideas would be out of date before anything was done about them.

So, questions for readers (please do comment!):

• Do you think this idea was a good one? Or is it terrible for the library, the students or both?
• Was this library just cheap and nasty and should have bypassed the whole process by forking out for proper marketing advice?
• Has your library done any really out-of-the ordinary collaborations in the name of library marketing? Tell us all about it!

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