Focus on the library customer: revelation, revolution, or redundancy? - Marketing of Library and Information Services

Abstract

Librarians experience some unease with marketing's focus on the customer in spite of the centrality of a user focus in defining the profession. By examining different organizational objectives for libraries, the choices librarians make about customer focus and orientation toward marketing become clearer. Ideas from the relatively new field of social marketing reveal the social cause/message heart of some organizational objectives and suggest that adopting a customer orientation toward marketing may not be the best fit for some libraries.

Introduction

Poet Linda Pastan (1982) muses: "What we want is never simple" (pp. 98-99). Her statement may best be appreciated in a society where what we want never seems absent. Daily opinion polls, letters to the editor, talk shows, e-mail, and numerous other channels distribute freely what people like, what they think, what they want. Within that context, any additional deliberate emphasis placed on probing the needs, wants, and perceptions people hold can appear to be somewhat absurd. Yet that is exactly what marketing experts invite library and information professionals to do as they emphasize focus on the customer and potential customer (Kotler & Andreasen, 1991).

The invitation falls on conditioned ears. Weingand (1987) states: "The theories of marketing have not been widely embraced by practitioners in the information professions" (p. 5). Why? Library and information professionals typically act from a substantive value base which includes an underlying belief in a basic human need for information (de la Pena McCook, 1993, p. 1). The enactment of the library's service is built upon not just what customers want at a given moment but what professionals have determined customers need for the long term. Moreover, many library and information professionals have considerable experience with what customers are able to say about what they want (Katz, 1992). Such experience suggests that people frequently do not ask for what they really want (even if one consciously sets aside the issue of what they really need). So the request to librarians to study what customers need, want, and perceive can provoke a, vague sense of unease. It seems to place professional judgment and commitment at the periphery rather than at the center of library work. It appears to put more stock than may be warranted in a customer's ability to define what is wanted and needed.

This sense of unease needs our collective attention; it should not be disregarded or attributed to wrongheadedness. Librarians choose the degree to which focus on the customer is implemented in their libraries. For example, being client centered and customer driven is forecast as a core competency for special librarians (Ojala, 1993). The marketing approach, including focus on customers, has been argued in public library literature and after-hours conference gatherings for the past fifteen years. Much of the debate has focused on collection development (Baker, 1993). "Give 'em what they want," argues Rawlinson (1981, p. 2188). Others argue equally strenuously for giving them what they need (Hamilton, 1987). Academic and school librarians, until recently cocooned in the comparative luxury of collections centered on curricula, have demurred. Collection issues, however, are not the only operational area for determining degrees of customer focus. As all libraries consider the implications of decentralized collections and the impacts of new technologies, the process of increased focus on customers comes to include designing technical interfaces, managing on-site and virtual library operations, hiring consultative personnel, and many other aspects of library and community development.

Although consensus regarding the degree to which focus on the customer should be implemented in libraries may not be possible, the topic is still worthy of discussion. Over the next few years, librarians will face significant amounts of social change in the academic, corporate, and civic communities they serve. New opportunities for collaboration will arise. The time is right to attempt to achieve some clarity concerning various foci on customers and why they exist by looking at the organizational objectives libraries have, the orientations toward marketing librarians seem to hold, and the implications that may flow from an increased focus on customers. Such clarity will enable professionals to consciously choose specific objectives, orientations, and degrees of customer focus in order to increase the effectiveness of libraries and librarians.

Organizational Objectives

The processes of preserving, organizing, and assuring access to information are imbued with the presence of the potential customer. This infusion provides historical definition, but it also plays a critical role in the discussion of the future of libraries. In 1991, the Council of the American Library Association challenged the profession to think about who would be information providers in the twenty-first century and what roles those professionals might play. In her response, de la Pena McCook (1993) writes: