The Marketing Apprentice Starring Allen Sacharine Welcome Allen

The (Marketing) Apprentice Starring: Allen Sacharine

Welcome! Allen Sacharine Chief Executive For the next twelve minutes you will have the opportunity to work with me on the marketing team of AMSLIB NHS Trust. Your mission (whether you accept it or not) is to give our worthy but much neglected Trust Library a “makeover”. To do this we will use something called “The Marketing Mix” If you succeed you may even find yourself taking home a fivefigure salary (well you are librarians, after all!)

The “Marketing Mix” • The so-called ‘marketing mix’ describes those elements that can be manipulated to maintain competitive edge Allen Sacharine Chief Executive “Team A, perhaps you could share with us what you have found out about “the marketing mix””.

Team A Our team has discovered that “the marketing mix” typically refers to the 4 Ps (Mc. Carthy, 1960): – – Product, Place/distribution, Pricing and Promotion As librarians we typically focus on PRODUCT. But we would do well to consider the other elements.

Team A We should ask ourselves: • Are products distributed from a physical PLACE, or is the intranet, or even Internet, used for distribution? • How do PRICES for library products or services compare with electronic Internet based current awareness, document delivery or bibliographic services? Price not only relates to fee-based services but equally to how individual users ‘value’ the service. • Finally, will the library actively PROMOTE its services or risk losing business to new information providers?

Well that was boring and predictable! Allen Sacharine Chief Executive You are supposed to be attracting an eager band of innovative health librarians into the wonderful world of marketing – what you have found out so far is hardly going to twizzle any twin-sets! Do you have anything else to offer us?

Team A • As marketing has expanded into service delivery, the 4 Ps have been joined by three more Ps (Dibb and Simkin, 1994): • PEOPLE – staff selection and customer care training. Information services are not likely to be delivered by people who are unskilled or demotivated; • PHYSICAL EVIDENCE – décor and ambience • PROCESS – efficiency of the process, delivering just-in-time not just-in-case. (Booth, 2000).

Four Ps? Seven Ps? Where will it end? Allen Sacharine Chief Executive Well you seem to have more Ps than Birdseye – is that the full sum of your intellectual efforts or do you have something else to say before your team is frozen out?

Team A And there’s more……. In specifically writing about library marketing, Weingand (1995) adds two more P’s: • PRELUDE (marketing audit – the needs analysis) and • POSTLUDE (evaluation). Er…Sir Allen – why are you glaring at us like that?

Nine Ps? Marketing Mix-Up, more like it! Allen Sacharine Chief Executive Right, by now I am thoroughly P-ed off. I hope that Team B has something better to offer?

Team B Well Sir Allen, our quest took us on the High Cs, namely to the 4 C's developed by Lauterborn (1990): • Place becomes CONVENIENCE • Price becomes COST TO THE USER • Promotion becomes COMMUNICATION • Product becomes CUSTOMER NEEDS AND WANTS

Now we have gone from Ps to Cs! Allen Sacharine Chief Executive What deadwood have I been given for this series? I suspect there is more wood pulp in this Board Room than they hold in the Bodleian! If I wanted PCs I can go to my warehouses where I am up to my armpits in PC-1512 s! Team B you literally have seconds to save yourselves!

Team B • But Sir Allen, the beauty of these C's is that they embody a much more client-oriented marketing philosophy. • When we deliver a library service we need to consider how convenient this will be for the client. • If we emphasise what the customer really wants (what they really, really want – but that is Spice, not Sugar!) they challenge previous marketing assumptions – for example, PROMOTION is a “one-way push“ of information which is markedly inferior to the two-way dialogue of COMMUNICATION.

Well you have at least earned a stay of execution! Allen Sacharine Chief Executive I can see that the traditional idea of marketing as reflected by the 4 Ps is too product-oriented and that a product is no good without a customer. However I don’t think that the 4 Cs are anything like as memorable as the P-words. I think that it is just another example of PC gone mad!

Let the audience decide! • So what do you think? Consider the two competing models of “the marketing mix” (4 Ps vs 4 Cs) and how they might apply to your service. Which is likely to be more useful when you are planning to give your library service a competitive edge? Record your thoughts in your portfolio.

Sleep well… • …And make your decision carefully and wisely… • After all the survival of your service is at stake – will you survive the Pro. MISe FOLIO Course into Week Three or will you hear those dreaded words…. ?

You’re Fired!

References - 1 • Booth, A (2000). Marketing a service. In: Booth, A & Walton G (Eds). Managing knowledge in health services. (pp. 162 -172). London: Library Association. http: //www. shef. ac. uk/scharr/mkhs/chapters. htm • Dibb S & Simkin L, The Marketing Casebook, Routledge, 1994 • Lauterborn, B (1990) New marketing litany: four Ps passe: C-words take over. Advertising Age. 61 (41), 26.

References - 2 • Mc. Carthy, J. (1960 1 st ed. ), Basic Marketing: A managerial approach, 13 th ed. , Irwin, Homewood Il, 2001. • Weingand, DE. (1995) Preparing for the Millennium: The Case for Using Marketing Strategies. Library Trends. 43(3): 295. Available at: http: //www. findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_m 1387 /is_n 3_v 43/ai_16709298

Additional Reading • Marketing mix (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Marketing_mix • Webber S (2005) Marketing Mix http: //dis. shef. ac. uk/sheila/marketing/mix. htm