Keywords
Citation
Holt, G. (2003), "Library branding for young adolescents: learning from Barbie and Mickey", The Bottom Line, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2003.17016bab.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited
Library branding for young adolescents: learning from Barbie and Mickey
Library branding for young adolescents: learning from Barbie and Mickey
Keywords: Branding, marketing strategy, Corporate identity, Marketing planning, Libraries
It is a cliché in North American library administration to assert that libraries need to market their services and programs. Typically, a marketing consultant states that if a library takes on more overt marketing activities (e.g. more outreach, direct mail, brochures, book marks, bus cards, neighborhood billboards, radio ads and/or television public service announcements) it will increase its constituents' visitation, circulation, reference and virtual usage.
Many libraries, however, are beyond being told that they must engage in marketing. These organizations have been doing lots of marketing for lots of years. St Louis Public Library (SLPL) is one of these. When we count up all the money we spend on outreach printing and programs, marketing staff costs, including outreach staff visits to schools, daycares and senior centers, we spend between 7 percent and 10 percent of our $18 million annual budget on re-enforcing the library-use behavior of current users and reaching out to encourage non-users to become users.
Technology has complicated and at the same time given new tools to library marketing, especially marketing to young adolescents. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) made a $250,000 grant to SLPL to ascertain how, why and for what did this young adolescent group, especially those who are poor, use our library's Internet computers. One part of the study was to refine the library's marketing emphasis for young adolescent users. Two Florida State LIS professors and the head of SLPL's extensive children's program units set out to apply the research findings to library marketing.
As part of its IMLS grant study, the SLPL research team hired Funosophy, a California-based company that specializes in marketing to children and teens. Funosophy's clients include the companies that manufacture and sell Barbie and pieces of the Disney empire. Hence, the article's title: The library set out to learn library branding for young adolescents from both Barbie and Mickey Mouse.
Branding is the marketing process by which a for-profit or non-profit firm marks its products and services behaviorally and attitudinally. Branding is the way to mark a product or service: to make it recognizable, memorable and the base for action as young consumers, including young adolescents; to make decisions about their family time and resource choices. In the St Louis study, researchers and consultants made one critical assumption: Young adolescents, even those who fall toward the lower end of the economic scale, participate in or dominate their time choices, one of which is visiting a local library.
To set out the library's basic framework for branding to children, a Funosophy marketing professional took 30 staff members, including representatives from adult services, children's services and administration, through a branding exercise. The exercise lasted for six hours over two days that fell a week apart. The remainder of this article provides a brief summary of the starting questions in this exercise and the branding consensus that emerged in staff discussions. (One note: the best of these branding sessions usually are led by marketing professionals from an outside organization. Such persons pick up on different nuances and force clarification of meanings that staff working for a specific firm might not ordinarily see.)
Here are the starting questions and very brief summaries of the answers that our staff developed:
- 1.
What business are we in? Answers to this question set the frame of reference for brand positioning:
- 2.
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Current business: Information/knowledge, literacy and community development.
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Future business: Change/improvement, creativity/imagination and entertainment.
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- 3.
What is our competition?
- 4.
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For time and attention: social – peers and the mall; entertainment – TV, video arcade and the Internet; school and other organized activities.
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Most direct competition: Book stores.
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- 5.
Who is our target consumer/user? Who will determine the purchase of our products? Within our mission and resources, how should we reallocate effort among our priority consumer targets?:
- 6.
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Non-users – 85 percent of our total effort. Divided between:
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– Primary – boys and girls age 12-14 years old – 60 percent.
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– Secondary – mums of boys and girls 12-14 years old – 25 percent.
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Users – 15 percent of our total marketing effort as a reinforcement to continuing library use – tertiary – boys and girls 12-14 years old.
These statistical choices might seem unusual without recognizing the character of the St. Louis constituency. Here are the staff descriptions of typical persons in the three constituencies listed above:
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- 7.
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"Primary: Non-user boys and girls 12-14 years old: Low income, attend public school, reads at the third-or-fourth grade level instead of sixth-to-eighth grade level, no access to computers at school or at home. Boy likes sports, but has weak institutional associations, and therefore is not involved in organized sports. Girl likes to socialize with friends. Non-user group also includes occasional users who come to the library only to use computers but participate in no other library programs. Favorite Web sites are Baliwood and anything about Nelly."
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"Secondary: Non-user moms of boys and girls 12-14 years old. Low-to-middle income, works hard to support her kids, depends on older sibling or relative to care for younger children while she works. She is time crunched and has low involvement with kids. She uses TV to entertain/baby sit them, relies on public school system to educate them."
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"Tertiary: User boys and girls 12-14 years old. Low-income, attends public school, comes to library almost daily with younger siblings for whom he/she cares. Actively participates in library programs such as homework help, borrowing books, computer and reading programs. Favorite Web sites are Baliwood and anything about Nelly."
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- 8.
What is our primary target? Fulfill consumer needs:
- 9.
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Peer acceptance, belonging and friends.
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Fun and adventure.
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Computer access and skills.
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- 10.
What are our consumer insights/frustrations? The St Louis Public Library does not offer enough of …...:
- 11.
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Fun and entertainment (i.e. it is boring, too much like school).
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Ease/freedom of use (i.e. there are too many rules).
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Enough computers.
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- 12.
What is our basic positioning? What is the single most important reason why some potential user would want this product? It offers a great variety of free entertainment (books, CDs, videos, computers).
- 13.
What is the reason to believe that supports our position?:
- 14.
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Library has large and varied collection of entertainment (books, CDs, videos, computers).
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Consumers can use/borrow free of charge.
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Staff works with users as necessary to empower them to act on their own choices.
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- 15.
What should be our brand character? List adjectives that describe our brand as if it were a person:
- 16.
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Friendly, helpful.
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Diverse.
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Fun.
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I do not expect that other libraries will arrive at the same elements of the branding equation that SLPL staff did. Libraries need to be different because their constituencies are different. The process is very helpful, however, if it achieves nothing more than helping to bring some focus to the often unplanned Topsy "just-grow" character that so many libraries use as the basis for allocation of resources. Along with being useful, branding exercises can be fun and they give staff an opportunity to talk in new ways about their everyday work and public-service focus. I recommend such an exercise for any library attempting to discern the placement of technology within the organization's services offerings and market positions.
Funosophy did an effective job for SLPL, helping our staff redefine the content of the institution's marketing program to young adolescents. With the firm's help, staff developed a consensus description of the library's marketing effort for this group and how that effort had to shift to use networked computing to attract young adolescents into regular library use. The study was a value-adding exercise that will make the expenditure of marketing funds more effective.
Glen HoltExecutive Director of the St. Louis Public Library, St Louis, MO, USA