do you ever read an article and it just resonates with you? everything the author has written sits perfectly within your world view, so that you exhale when completing it and say to yourself, “yes, this.” enter: deborah lee’s 2003 article, “marketing research: laying the marketing foundation,” library administration & management 17(4): 186-188. it’s a brief article; it gets in and gets out and leaves you with the understanding that libraries think about marketing all wrong but also outlines the steps to correct that.
i’ve just completed a research project that analyzes the text of 24 published case studies on marketing electronic resources in libraries. after reading the case studies it became clear that libraries generally do not do a good/consistent job with evaluating their marketing tasks. it occurs to me now that i have read this article by lee that perhaps libraries don’t analyze their marketing well because they’re not really sure *why* they’re marketing. lee’s article states that before you market you need to understand what your patrons want from you, and then develop a marketing plan to let them know that you can provide them with what they want. in the case studies i read i didn’t see any of that marketing groundwork described. it makes sense, then, that a library wouldn’t be able to successfully evaluate marketing tasks if the purpose was never defined.
also, a zinger on p. 186:
Picture this scenario: you’re a member of a committee drafted to examine the current library instruction program offered by your college library. Your library offers a number of free workshops for students, but attendance is very low. Too frequently, the discussion in such a committee will center on the question: how do we encourage students to attend the workshops and instructional sessions? According to marketing theory, as defined by Kolter and others, this is the wrong question.
