Try This Tuesday

For this week's "Try This," I'm highlighting a new marketing trend called, appropriately enough, Tryvertising. According to TrendWatching.com, Tryvertising is, "a new breed of product placement in the real world, integrating your goods and services into daily life in a relevant way, so that consumers can make up their minds based on their experience, not your messages." The idea here is to allow customers to experience your service firsthand in a context that is relevant for them to understand what you have to offer.

Who's doing it? Lots of businesses are Tryvertising such as hotels, bars and restaurants, and even schools are in on it. It remains to be seen if this strategy can work for libraries. Since library services are free and fairly low-risk to begin with, there is probably little need to "try before you buy." However, the idea of delivering these services in contexts relevant to patrons (other than the library) might be worth consideration. For instance, maybe a library kiosk loaded with health resources in major health care provider locations could be effective.

Since we'll be seeing more Tryvertising in our day-to-day life, it's worth knowing about. And, who knows? It might even inspire some creative library marketing ideas!