Marketing 101 for geeks

InfoWorld reports on a keynote speech delivered by Steve Yegge, Senior Software Engineer for Google, at OSCON's open source convention. You can view the 20-minute-long-or-so presentation on Blip.tv. Most of it is in geek-speak, but the branding lessons are good for anyone. The InfoWorld article describes the talk and some major branding principles, including this one:

But branding is much more than product name or PR. A brand stands for the experience customers have with a product.

It also lists two recommended readings, the first of which Yegge refers to in his talk:

1. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
2. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Enjoy!

Non-profit marketing book to read

Sybil of Quality Service Marketing, recommends a stellar book on non-profit marketing called Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes. The title alone floats this book to the top of my reading pile. The author will be speaking at the AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference as will Sybil - I SO wish I could be there! Maybe Sybil will be kind enough to share the highlights? I'm excited to crack this book open! Please let me know your thoughts if you get a chance to read it.

Speaking of do-gooder marketing, my next post will (finally) describe the research project I've been working on with a professor from the VCU Marketing Department. I hope it will provide yet more proof that marketing can and does contribute toward the greater good.

Update: The author of Robin Hood Marketing, Katya Andresen, also writes a Non-Profit Marketing Blog that would be perfectly at home on your aggregator. :)

Give this a squeeze

I finally finished reading the popular book on creativity, Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage. I reviewed the piece and highlighted some interesting points about creativity on Designing Better Libraries. I mention it here because creativity is directly related to marketing. In fact, the authors of the book contend that creativity is one of the few remaining ways to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. In my opinion, this is especially true of services like ours which compete with a number of alternatives and lack large marketing budgets. Necessity is the mother of creativity after all, right? ;-) I do recommend reading it (it doesn't take very long), with special attention to the Lessons Learned section at the end. If you've already read it, please share your opinions!

Customers and customer service

Sybil of the Quality Service Marketin blog writes about her take on a Maritz white paper called "Delight or Defection: The Pivotal Role of People Inside the Customer Experience" (PDF). In it, Maritz argues that companies need a better way of understanding "people issues" to properly motivate people on the front lines, which in turn increases customer retention and differentiates the service. As the executive summary states,

"By putting "people problems" at the strategic forefront, companies can turn customer experience initiatives from frustrating flops into manageable and scalable programs – programs that, if executed correctly, create a major competitive advantage in today’s less differentiated reality."

Sybil will offer more analysis of this approach in a later post, but give the piece a read in the meantime.

To round out your weekend reading, stop by the MarketingProfs Book Club Group Review. (You can learn more about Group Reviews here and the Book Club here). The book of choice this time around is Citizen Marketers. You can join in on the conversation by signing up, or you can just browse through the discussions on social media and related topics. Either way, it's pretty interesting. I have to admit, I didn't get around to reading the book in time to participate in the Book Club, but I do want to give it a try at least once. The next book will announced mid-February. MarketingProfs is being secretive about the title for now, but promise that it will be about branding and innovation (two of my favorite topics!).

Guest post from Nicole McGee on non-users

Guest post from Nicole McGee

Nicole McGee, of the Municipal Reference Library in Virginia Beach, VA, has been very helpful in passing marketing goodies for the blog my way.  In fact, she had so many things to say that I offered her a guest post for her to share some of her thoughts.  Nicole chose to write about a book called The Must-Have Customer:  7 Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven't Got, and reflect a bit on reaching out to our potential patrons who donÂ’t yet use the library.  

Here'’s what Nicole had to say:

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The Virginian-Pilot (4/27/06, p. D5) had a short review of a new book (April 2006) called The Must-Have Customer: 7 Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven't Got by Robert Gordman. In my experience, this is a discussion all library marketing committees have on a regular basis. How DO we reach those pesky "non-library users?" And as this new book addresses, how do we win back the customers who are lured away? Warm, cozy bookstores and your favorite local wireless hang-out, among others, are all competing against libraries for peopleÂ’s attention and "business." And in a lot of cases, they're winning. So how do libraries effectively get the word out about all their services and collections?

Marketing literature in unexpected places is one potential strategy. MPPOW (my previous place of work) placed advertisements for our classes and our peer advising program in the local buses. The 2002 ACRL Innovation in Instruction award was CSU-Fresno's InfoRadio program, a series of public service announcements creatively promoting information literacy skills that aired on the campus radio station.

And also related to this topic is the idea of "library as place" and all the ways that it affects people'’s decision to return or not (un)welcoming policies (see Aaron Schmidt's, aka The Walking Paper blogger, Flickr pic), (un)inviting atmospheres, and a customer service-(un)savvy staff, to name a few.

One solution is knowing what future patrons want or expect from your library. While browsing through The Cluetrain Manifesto, the idea that the "internal" (companies, libraries, etc) and the "external" (patrons) need to be able to communicate freely, i.e. online, in an integral component. Organizations who don't build this into their culture, if one follows this idea from the book, will become far removed from the pulse of the conversations happening online and will quickly become obsolete. And IMHO, this is yet another strong argument for library blogs, RSS feeds, and other exciting forms of communication and exchange that are at the heart of Library 2.0 concept.

Here's the link to the Amazon.com if you want to read more about this new book: http://tinyurl.com/q9dzg

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Thanks for sharing your point-of-view, Nicole!  I hope to hear from others on this topic too. I plan to address reaching out to non-users more on this blog, since it'’s an important obligation we share.  One thought I'm exploring is how to use our biggest library fans to help draw in those who are the less-than-enthusiastic.  More (hopefully) later.

Categories: must_reads | tips_to_try