{"id":197,"date":"2007-11-07T16:23:53","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T23:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=197"},"modified":"2007-11-07T16:23:53","modified_gmt":"2007-11-07T23:23:53","slug":"marketing-your-library-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2007\/11\/marketing-your-library-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing your library services"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last session of the conference, which is a presentation by the Antony Brewerton from the Unversity of Warwick about branding and libraries. He wrote an article called "Wear lipstick, have a tattoo, belly-dance, then get naked<\/strong>: The making of a virtual librarian" – he suggests if you enter ‘Antony Brewerton naked<\/a>‘ into Google, you’ll be suprised what you’ll find!<\/p>\n

So – to start with we should consider what we mean by brand, particularly the ‘library brand’ and review the options for re-imagining the brand.<\/p>\n

Brand is more than just the logo. "A set of ssets (or liabilities) linked to a brand’s name and sybmol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service" – David Aaker from Building strong brands, 1996.<\/p>\n

Walter Landor (an ad guy) said "Simply put, a brand is a promise". The Building Brands website has more on brand definitions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To start with, What is a library?<\/p>\n

The OCLC perceptions report (Question 807) found that the first thing people thought of was – wait for it – books. The point that Antony makes, that if this is what people think a library is, then when you try to have a open, flexible learning space without books (such as described by Les Watson this morning<\/del> see the comment from Les Watson below, more accurately I think Les described flexible learning spaces, but wasn’t suggesting that there should be no books<\/em>) then you are going to get resistance rather than support.<\/p>\n

The library includes:<\/p>\n