Information Marketing

Citation

Calvert, P. (2002), "Information Marketing", The Electronic Library, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 157-158. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2002.20.2.157.4

There will be many students around the world, especially in Commonwealth countries, familiar with Jennifer Rowley’s textbooks on information technology (e.g. Organizing Knowledge, 3rd ed., Gower, 2000). For a number of years she has been Head of the School of Management and Social Sciences at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in the UK, and so it is quite natural that her writing has extended into the management field. This new title is clearly designed to be a student text, probably best suited to postgraduate LIS students, providing extra resources to supplement the basic content. Each chapter commences with a list of Aims, for which one could read “learning objectives”. The text of the chapter is set out so that students work through key concepts in a step‐by‐step way, supplemented by two devices. The first is a series of self‐evaluation questions that ask the reader to stop and think about a topic that has just been covered in the text – an example from the “Information marketplace” chapter says “Reflect: examine the Website of your local public library. How many organizations are identified on this Website as partners of the public library?” (p. 23). This makes the reader extend the learning beyond the text to take in real examples from relevant information organizations. The second device is the frequent “figures” that can be anything from a list of collaborative projects (p. 24), models of marketing communication (p. 113), a comparison of National Library of Australia documents delivery services (for the pricing strategies) (p. 141) and many more, including suitable readings taken from related literature.

The order of the chapters follows a logical and quite traditional sequence. First marketing is defined. Rowley clearly favours the view that marketing is all about meeting customer needs and keeping them satisfied. The crucial chapter on the “information marketplace” helps students understand that they are in a competitive environment, and if they do not accept that this requires them to apply marketing techniques then they and their institutions might easily disappear. Rowley gives a distinct emphasis on libraries forming partnerships. The third chapter examines customers, making it clear that the public sector has customers in just the same way that the private sector does. Segmentation and targeting are important topics in this chapter. Chapter 4 is about building customer relations, especially “relationship marketing” that one find in the service quality models popularised by the SERVQUAL team, and by Hernon and Altman. The fifth chapter is about our information products, especially the rather hard concept of information as a product. The next chapter covers branding and corporate identity, a fairly new idea for librarians to embrace; yet done successfully by some organisations such as Christchurch City Libraries <http://library.christchurch.org.nz/Connect/2000/96/Branding.asp>. It would have been good to see mention of these real success stories in Rowley’s text. The seventh chapter deals with marketing communications – and it is only here that readers will encounter advertising, perhaps a surprise to some that have only ever thought of marketing as another word for promotion. Personally I was happy to see mention of sponsorship, though this topic merits a book of its own. In the eight chapters we discover Rowley’s expertise in the field of pricing, a topic she has visited several times before, and it shows in the simple explanation of sometimes difficult concepts such as demand and supply, costing, pricing strategies, customer factors and market factors. This chapter is a little gem. The book concludes with two chapters on “collecting marketing data” and “marketing strategy and planning”. Important, for sure, though perhaps beyond the immediate reach of most students reading this book as a text.

Each chapter has a short bibliography that includes more references to the management literature than to LIS titles – a good point, in my humble opinion – and there is a basic, accurate index. This book could well become very familiar to many students in the near future. Highly recommended as a student text. Recommended also to practitioners who need to improve their knowledge of information marketing.