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October 27, 2006
Westminster City Council
We all know that "statistics can be made to say anything". The same is true of people who fly under the flag of "marketing experts"-- they can say anything at all and most of it is nonsense
I spent much of my young working career realising that this doesn't have to be true. Actually marketing can be logical, sensible and it is interesting because sometimes the public are unpredictable and people can be genuinely creative. But I felt at home when I thought of it as being "communication". I learned from Tim Waterstone and another genius called Bryan Austin at WH Smith that marketing is best when straightfoward messages are made interesting. If you want people to believe you will have the book they need, then say you believe in books and that people's need for them is genuine and honourable and get a reputation for having the book they need. We were very good at that simple message. Our brand was one of the best ever brand promotions in the UK in the past 50 years. We knew how to be proud of what we did-- and we did it well. I understood exactly what we were doing. I still know how to market books to people-- be serious about them-- don't say "we do lots of other things" because that implies you don't believe they are important. It's easy. A smart restaurant wouldn't advertise the opportunity to use their photocopy machine or their dishwasher, or claim it was unique because you can book a table on-line- they would just offer really good food and get a reputation for always doing so; why should a library insist on telling everyone that it does everything in the world except try to stock the book they might need for their work?
This speech which was made at the Public Libraries Conference last week by the "Head of communications" at Westminster City Council. He is talking about the marketing of public libraries. It is complete tosh. "Shifting the library brand from buildings to people; from books to knowledge is the fundamental challenge." he says: so am I supposed to read Patrick Leigh Fermor to improve my knowledge? It only shows that he doesn't know what he's talking about, I'm afraid. Bless.
Why don't they just get a decent set of books, clean the buildings and get some new furniture to sit on and open 24 hours-- that would be good marketing. "Communication" is what we get when you cross the threshold: is the place light, bright, fall of the best of publisher's endless invention?, or dull and dreary with the same holes in jumpers behind the counter that have been unravelling for the past 30 years? Do the job, or get someone else to do it!!
There is, as he avoids saying, an extremely serious problem of the perception of the public library service in London. People believe it is awful, has nothing of use to them and is irrelevant to their lives. The number of people saying that "libraries are relevant" has fallen to nearly 10%. (In the countryside it is still over 50%). The reason for this is either A - libraries don't have what people need or B -- they do have what people need but nobody knows.. The answer is A and any half rate marketing manager can tell you ( as could my cat)
At least Mark Field, the MP for Westminster knows what a proper public library service should do, as he made clear in his speech at the same conference. I only hope the people from Westminster City Council were listening to what he said and taking notes. It would be very embarrrassing for them to find themselves excluded from the initiatives being created in Mr Fields' department in Conservative Central Office. Very embarrasing indeed, but at the moment the managers of Westminster library service appear to be hand in glove with Mr Woolly Jumper and Miss Bo Peep-- which, in the circumstances, is the exact wrong place to be. Ah well, baah
Posted by Tim Coates at October 27, 2006 6:28 PM