Worlds Apart? The Relationship Between Teaching and
Marketing and What It Means to Academic Librarians
By Jill S. Stover, Undergraduate Services Coordinator, Virginia Commonwealth University
When I talk about library marketing with fellow librarians, they often
react to my thoughts based on one of two points of view. While most
librarians accept the notion that certain ideas from the business world
can further our profession, some reject the premise that marketing practices
have applications in library work. I have a difficult time understanding
this resistance. Not only are marketing techniques compatible with the
missions and values of libraries, but they also offer a practical—and
increasingly necessary—means of connecting our work to users’
needs.
Part of the reluctance of librarians to embrace marketing
is due to the misperception that businesses and libraries operate in
entirely separate and independent spheres. Businesses, after all, are
out to make money. Libraries exist to enrich their communities. This
false dichotomy ignores the fact that both marketers and librarians
engage in strikingly similar activities all the time. Unfortunately,
this thinking also erects barriers that keep librarians from taking
advantage of the useful ideas marketers can offer our profession. To
bridge the marketing and library worlds, it may be useful to compare
marketing to something familiar and comfortable to librarians, namely,
teaching.
The ultimate aim of any teacher or marketer is to
modify behaviors and thinking. Instructors develop learning objectives
that specify the behaviors and skills students are to have mastered
by the conclusion of the course. Outcomes could include the ability
to understand theoretical concepts, articulate ideas in a clear manner
or critically evaluate works based on acquired knowledge. Teachers assess
students’ progress toward the objectives by means of tests, papers
or other exercises. Achieving these outcomes requires that students
think and act differently than before they entered the class.
Prompting changes in behavior and thinking is also
what marketers aim to do. Common behavioral marketing objectives include
encouraging trial or purchase of a product or service so as to increase
market share or expand the current market. Often customers must be educated
about the benefits and features of a product before they will risk spending
their money on it. To educate customers, marketers take on the role
of teacher by using their communication channels to explain how the
product solves particular problems.
Instead of tests and papers, marketers usually measure
their success in terms of sales, which indicate whether customers adopted
the desired behavior of choosing their product or service over a competitor’s.
Sometimes the desired change is not sales per se, but a change in customers’
thinking. For instance, marketers try to position their products and
services so they are perceived by customers in a specific way. They
do this by teaching people to associate their products with desirable
characteristics. In addition, some marketers, like teachers, also seek
to obtain positive social change. Social marketers, for example, strive
to alleviate problems like drunk driving by correcting people’s
damaging behaviors.
Both educators and marketers are adept at tailoring
their strategies to specific groups of people. Teachers, for instance,
know that not all students learn equally well with a single instructional
method. Visual learners prefer diagrams, videos and illustrations, while
others respond better to lecture. Instructors address the variety of
learning needs, in part, by grouping students into classes by categories
such as grade levels, honors, special needs and disciplines, so that
they can adapt their teaching methods accordingly. Marketers also understand
that not all customers will respond in the same way to product offerings.
Much like teachers, marketers group similar customers together on the
basis of demographic characteristics, lifestyles and past behaviors.
Marketers call this process segmentation, and it’s intended to
ensure that the right products get to the right customers with a minimum
of wasted effort.
Furthermore, teachers and marketers are skilled in
understanding and utilizing motivation. If you have ever rewarded reluctant
students in your library instruction sessions with candy, you know how
important motivation is! Students and consumers are motivated by both
internal and external factors. Some people seek education or products
because of an inner drive for self-improvement, while others do so in
response to parental, peer or societal influence. Teachers manipulate
motivation by offering opportunities for extra credit, creating competitive
awards and mandating group projects to get the students’ best
work. For their part, marketers adjust prices, devise reward programs
for repeat purchases and attach prestigious logos to products like clothing
to prompt purchases.
Interestingly, teaching and marketing practices appear
to have evolved along parallel paths in that they have both become more
participatory in nature. Active learning—an approach favored by
many educators—asks students to take responsibility for their
own learning by becoming involved in the teaching process. Through active
learning, students explore ideas and teach their classmates what they
discover, while the instructor assumes a facilitating role. The same
is generally true of modern marketing practices. Rather than “pushing”
products on people as they once did, marketers now recognize that today’s
customers are increasingly savvy and empowered, demanding greater involvement
with the products they consume. In a movement referred to by some as
open source marketing (Cherkoff, 2005), customers now adopt many of
the roles that were formerly the exclusive domain of marketers. They
generate new product ideas, create advertising campaigns, participate
in customer-driven communities and share their opinions directly with
corporate decision-makers.
Done well, both teaching and marketing empower people
by giving them the intellectual tools, products and services they need
to achieve their goals. The point of this comparison is to demonstrate
that marketing practices are not drastically different from the activities
we librarians observe and engage in every day. Since the library and
marketing worlds have much in common, it’s reasonable to conclude
that both professions have something to offer the other. Just imagine
what librarians could accomplish if they matched their knowledge of
information and their local communities with the abilities of marketers
to communicate how their products and services solve customers’
problems. I don’t advocate that we librarians become business
people, but only that we think broadly about where we derive ideas that
promise to advance our own work.
References
Cherkoff, J. (2005, February). What is Open Source
Marketing? Retrieved July 31, 2007, from
http://changethis.com/14.OpenSourceMktg
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