Description
Enterprise relationship management or ERM is a business method in relationship management beyond customer relationship management.
Study on Role of Marketing and Relationship Management
abstract: This paper treats the concepts of marketing and relationship management as they apply to libraries. The author begins with a description of the current situation of libraries, librarians, and customer perceptions, and assesses the library's environment in light of the new realities of the workplace. Relationship management and its importance to the library's future success are defined.
W
hen I first started to think about this topic seriously, it was during a conversation with a businessman from the Czech Republic who was visiting the University of Michigan Business School. I found myself explaining a
great deal about libraries in the United States and answering questions about areas that I might not have thought about if I had been talking to someone from North America. We got into a discussion about new technology and how we were going to keep libraries and librarians relevant. That discussion, along with my belief that we need to be morevisible, pro-active, results-oriented, and customer-focused, led me to consider the concepts of marketing and relationship management as they apply to libraries. I have also been influenced by my thirteen years at the University of Michigan Business School, where marketing and customers are familiar terms.
Terminology
I believe that terms such as marketing and customers are not necessarily comfortable for librarians unless they work in the corporate sector. Library culture tends to talk of patrons and users. In an article in College and Research Libraries News a few years ago, Irene Hoadley objected to the term customer, and subsequent letters to the editor confirmed that she was not alone in her view. Her argument was that patrons, unlike
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2001), pp. 339-350. Copyright © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218.
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
customers, should be taught to be self-sufficient. How ironic that today, we worry about whether we will be needed when so many people choose to do their own searches on the Internet and often discover something that satisfies them. We tell people that the Internet is chaotic, full of irrelevancies, and As organizations seek greater insufficient for their needs, and advise to use efficiency, even universities and
governments will not support the our expensive,that their searches Wee contentladen resources.
cost of providing resources and services if they are not used and if librarians cannot articulate how their roles add value.
tell them ar rudimentary; therefore, they should be consulting us for more sophisticated, structured search techniques in order to get better results. We believe that our work, our professional mission, is connecting content and customers through access and service. So why aren't they listening? Why aren't they calling upon us constantly? As organizations seek greater efficiency, even universities and governments will not support the cost of providing resources and services if they are not used and if librarians cannot articulate how their roles add value.
Perceptions of the Profession
The conventional view of the librarian is that she is a shy, retiring, bookish person who does not take charge, does not make decisions, and does not assert herself. Librarianship is assumed to be primarily a female profession, at least in North America, further stereotyping the general image and assumptions about librarians. In 1988, David Fisher analyzed the findings of psychological research conducted over the previous thirty years to determine if there was a distinct personality type for librarians. He discovered that there was no evidence to support that assumption, but he also discovered that librarians seem to want to make things worse for themselves and confirm the stereotypes. In October 1999, at a meeting of the Ontario Library Association, Marilyn McDermott, of Mohawk College proposed that the personality type likely to choose librarianship as a career, based on her personal observation (confirming Fisher's conclusion about reinforcing stereotypes), and the major research connecting type to careers/occupations, is not the personality type needed to succeed in the "new" academic library environment. According to McDermott, the Myers Briggs personality type test is being used extensively in corporate America to match and move employees into jobs that make sense for their personality types. Richard Bolles' scheme, which links to "Holland codes" (standard research for occupational decision-making and matching), is also used. McDermott's argument is that library schools and library managers should take into account this research when recruiting and making decisions about selection and placement. Daniel Goleman, best known for his book Emotional Intelligence, has another view. Speaking at the University of Michigan Business School in spring 2000, he discussed the skills that enhance professional effectiveness, career success, and organizational performance. In addition to technical competence and cognitive abilities, there is
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emotional intelligence, which includes personal competence skills and social competence skills. Contrary to McDermott, Goleman is not in favor of personality testing by corporations because people can change over a lifetime and be labeled inappropriately. He believes such tests are valuable for self-development only. As a result, those of us in the profession today must decide what they are best suited for, how they can develop personally, and how they can move into this new paradigm, which is clearly more overt, more pro-active, and more competitive than it has been. Librarians must also be prepared to deal with the problems they encounter and that will not be easy. Above all, librarians must be willing to change.
Our Environments and Defining Our Profession
In addition to stereotypes, we are confronted with managing our environments and defining our profession. Librarianship in the United States takes so many forms it is not surprising that non-librarians have trouble understanding who we are and what we do. We do not necessarily agree on our mission and core values. What is the common denominator among the following?
• A school librarian with a $10,000 annual budget spends the day with elementary • An academic librarian manages a $2M annual information budget and runs a
complex technical services operation with traditional and nontraditional information. • A public librarian in a medium-sized town offers children's reading hour, supports the information needs of everyone from gardeners to local business persons, deals with the homeless, and negotiates local politics through a public library board. • A corporate librarian in an international banking operation runs a library that never closes, has branches in various geographic locations, focuses heavily on reference, and provides answers with an average turnaround time of thirty three minutes per question. • An information specialist at a "dot com" company manages a small group involved in selecting content, designing web pages, programming, and other related activities. • A student attends the School of Information at the University of Michigan and chooses among the following graduate programs: archives and records management; human computer interaction; information economics, management and policy; library and information services. The answer lies in connecting content and customers through access and service. From the outside looking in, that mission is less easy to discern. Just as our environments differ, so does the way we work. Collaboration, consultation, consensus, and elaborate processes have been my personal experience as an academic librarian in three different institutions in two different countries. We decide things by committee. I assume that a corporate librarian attends far fewer meetings than an academic librarian and because the culture is different, the corporate librarian can make many more decisions students in an inner city, struggling with the basics of literacy.
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
independently and more quickly. For the information specialist, neither way of working has the least relevance. Speed is the key.
Whom We Serve
At the University of Michigan Business School, the primary customers are the school's faculty, students, and staff. The library also serves the larger campus and the community at large, as a publicly-funded university, but the primary customers are a distinct group. Looking at student behavior is valuable to a discussion of user as customer because ultimately students will be community leaders, corporate movers and shakers, university faculty, and citizens generally. The University of Michigan Business School hosts an annual combined meeting of its four advisory boards. During the meeting in April, 2000, Russell Epker, speaking on behalf of our Corporate Board, which represents companies that hire our graduates, told us about the skill set board members want to see in students who will later come to their companies:
• • • • • • • • • •
ability to communicate ability to build relationships diversity (cultural background) • willingness to take risks creativity multi disciplinary capability ability to work at e-speed high intellectual capability real caring for other people (instead of the "me" generation) leadership (not hierarchical, but innate) team player abilities
How well do librarians measure up to these characteristics? It is useful to compare them to the characteristics of people in your organizations, the customers you serve, and the organizations themselves. This is the new reality as defined by representatives of the business world. We are beginning to feel its presence in academe as we see business leaders take the helm of universities (e.g., Michigan State University) and as we see public pressure mounting on academic institutions to be more accountable for everything from the dollars they spend to the capability of their graduates. Note, also, that communication is at the top of the list, followed by relationship building. Later in the same program, our Visiting Committee spoke to the issue of speed by complaining about the bureaucracy of government and universities. The spokesman, Bob Knowling, gave us his own lesson on speed. His company sought to acquire another company whose shares were trading at $27/share. By the time they were ready to make the deal, some four weeks later, the shares were at $127/share and he could not close the deal. The next time he wanted to acquire a company, he told his staff that they had four days to make the decision. If everyone else is communicating and moving at espeed, we need to do it, too.
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Data Gathering
The profession has argued endlessly for the collection of more effective data, but we are far from achieving that on a regular basis. Just as we have succeeded in implementing library automation systems that can provide us with use data on print materials for collection development purposes, we turn to the electronic world. Just as we create in-house CDROM networks where we can gather hit rates The profession has argued and get some sense of peak period usage, we turn to endlessly for the collection of with the Web and rely on vendors to provide us more effective data, but we use data. We even build that requirement into our contracts, but somehow we do not are far from achieving that on always get it. Of course, there is a conflict of interest a regular basis. inherent in relying on a vendor for such data. If use is high, the vendor will be happy to tell you. What a good argument for renewing or increasing your purchase! If use is low, however, what incentive does a vendor have for letting you know? You might cancel your subscription. What kind of relationship is this? It is fine to rely on your vendor person for appropriate information, but this is not relationship management in a business environment. The profession has spent decades on data. At base, there are standards from various national associations and data gathering by various groups, but they still hold to the following—they are input in nature (number of volumes bought, number of books checked out), rather than output in nature (what percentage of reference questions actually provides the information sought; does the web visitor reach the correct information for the question being researched). Meaningful data are also difficult to collect and lag behind the technological revolution. Librarians even disagree on what to collect. When the Dean of the Business School introduced the concept of Quality Indicators to our community, we in the library found the process very painful. In spite of our research, we could never quite make the process fit. After a few years, the Dean dropped this concept for a number of units, including the library. We lacked enough quality output data and our profession's standards lacked credibility because the source and rationale for them are unclear. The most valuable element, from an output measure, were the comments on our customer survey, where we could identify specific concerns and address them one by one as a form of relationship management. Why are data important to marketing and relationship management? They are important because they foster fact-based decision-making and enable us to find parallels and benchmarks across industries—whether they are service industries, like ours, or industries that are based on products, also like ours. Consider the sources we use to foster ideas. Reading the literature of librarianship is valuable, as is communicating with our colleagues, but what about literatures and people outside our own field? In my first library automation experience, back in the mid-1980s, I urged my colleagues to explore the airline industry because I saw parallels in our inventory control requirements. It had never occurred to them to consider this. The need to pursue information in other disciplines in this growing interdisciplinary age is critical, as is the need to build relationships
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
outside the library profession. Read a business journal. Talk to someone in the retail business. Find a parallel or a colleague in industrial engineering, a field often applied by the Dean of the University of Michigan's School of Information. 9 Seek reading and relationships outside librarianship to add dimension and value to your perspective.
Moving Towards Marketing and Relationship Management
With this framework in mind, we can now consider marketing, a concept that has been with the business world since its beginning, and relationship management, a relatively new idea that has emerged as a key component in marketing strategy. When looking for an all-encompassing quote, I chose the following:
At its most basic level, every member transaction, every interaction, every connection . . . — positive or negative—is marketing. In a strategic context, marketing drives the entire decision-making process and requires research that is objective, comprehensive and continuous. Marketing is strategic on one hand, the responsibility of everyone on the other. It is a philosophy, not a job —a way of thinking, not a department.10
This quote is from Neil Goldman, who works in the credit union industry, and I chose it for its focus on one-on-one relationships, strategy, continuous data gathering, and attitude/philosophy, all expressed in a very short statement. It is also relatively easy to translate to the library world. For example, what is a reference transaction but a one-on-one relationship? What is key here, however, is that the relationship stretches far beyond the reference transaction and it starts with the impression customers have when they walk in the door and see—what? What do your customers see when they walk in the physical door or the "web door?" Are these doors connected in theme and style? Have you tried walking in your own doors lately with an attempt to see them as if you had never seen them before? What do the signs say? What does the entrance or home page look like? What are visible staff members doing? How prominent are connections to staff or to help on your website? Go through the rest of the building or website with the same critical eye. Ask someone, a customer, to do it for you. Better yet, ask more than one. Make sure they are not librarians. What do your customers hear when they call on the telephone or read when they receive e-mail from your staff? When I was a library director, I made a point of calling our telephone entry points at least once or twice a term to find out what responses were being given. This is particularly important in that library's environment where there are approximately fifty to sixty student temporary staff working on the front lines. Regardless of the medium of communication, do you work to establish "brand identity?" Over the last few years, our School has worked to imprint its identity in people's minds. If I refer to "Coca Cola," you can see the logo in your mind and you know exactly what I mean whether you are in Atlanta, Georgia, the company's headquarters, or the Czech Republic. This should be your goal. Our school logo and name are used consistently and no area is allowed to deviate, including the library, which is a part of the school, not a part of the main campus library. The phones are answered with "University of Michigan Business School," then "Library" or "Kresge
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Business Administration Library." It is everyone's job to participate in imprinting the brand name and brand identity on customers. As a profession, we have long wanted to help people and we have focused carefully on providing information, but we have not paid such close attention to the details that As a profession, we have long can actually make or break us. wanted to help people and we To complicate matters further, the electronic world, in whatever form it eventually have focused carefully on takes, brings a whole new set of enterprises — providing information, but we information architecture, web design, content have not paid such close selection, changes in writing requirements, new elements for organizing the content, etc. The attention to the details that very concept of a physical library may or may not can actually make or break us. hold, but the mission is still the same — connecting content and customers through access and service. It is important to imbed marketing into this new enterprise from the beginning and not as an afterthought. Let us not repeat our historical mistake. Returning to data-gathering for a moment, Neil Goldman writes:
Quality, objective research is what allows marketing to be so effective. Without it —without knowing what member perceptions are and why —any strategic decision executed in the name of "marketing" is a pure gamble. As the old adage says, "You can't manage what you don't measure." Similarly, you can't fix what you don't know is broken. Without objective, quantifiable data to guide it, true marketing is impossible, and the organization as a whole is blind.11
Goldman is President of a firm that provides employee and member perception research surveys to the credit union industry. Naturally he is in favor of research. But note that what he is discussing is perceptions. I began with a discussion about the perception of librarians, both from librarian and external perspectives. I will broaden that to consider the full array of customer perceptions. Research does not necessarily always have to be about counting, although numerical data can be useful. Research also can include surveys or focus groups or one-on-one transactions. In the University of Michigan Business School's library, librarians are each assigned as liaisons to sub-areas of the School. One might be responsible for accounting and finance, for example, while another focuses on organizational behavior and human resources management. One liaison duty is to connect at least once a year, one-on-one, with each faculty member for a discussion about research, teaching, and other interests, and to solicit feedback on library resources and services. What resources and services do they need that they lack now? Liaisons consult regularly, often by e-mail, to notify faculty of new print and electronic resources. Further, when the library seeks to contain its budget by canceling subscriptions, the starting point is a list of least-used items (both from circulation and inhouse use counts) followed by consultation with faculty and, where relevant, Ph.D. students. This builds trust, which will be particularly important as everyone communicates less and less through traditional contact and more and more through remote means.
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
How will we handle marketing to remote users? How will we build trust in customers who communicate primarily through e-mail to a "library" mailbox? More than ever, it will be important to reach these users in some personal way. If we are lucky, we will already have relationships established and will be able to foster and promote them remotely. If we do not, we will have to find some way to interact with people one-on-one, finding out about their research and interests, and helping to enhance their work. In the end, we may find ourselves in the modern equivalent of an earlier era when people communicated by letter. The difference is that we will not have to wait weeks for the letters to go back and forth. The development of greater sophistication in technologies that permit voice and video to accompany text will return us to a closer equivalent of an in-person exchange, but it will not be the same. In the end, we will not only need to learn about our customers' research and information interests, but we will also have to discover how each of them prefers to interact—e-mail, telephone, video/voice/text combinations, in person, or in some way yet to be invented. These preferences may be inherent to each customer or may shift with generations, a subject too lengthy to explore in this article. We may find ourselves making appointments with customers for a long distance exchange, or planning to visit them at some designated location—office, home, café. Perhaps we will involve ourselves in more long-term assistance, working closely in person with a customer for a day or two and continuing the assistance by intermittent e-mail and telephone exchange. With another customer, we might have a short introduction via e- mail, but a long-term, multitechnological set of exchanges over the course of many months. Many combinations are possible. In addition to the liaison model at the Kresge Library, another key customer-focused activity is a lively suggestion board. Each submission receives a response within twenty- four business hours and responses are posted. The director sees a copy of every suggestion and every answer, in addition to responding to appropriate topics that should be handled by a director. The library e-mail address experiences a great deal of traffic, both in terms of suggestions and reference It is likely that all the activities
not already centered on e-mail or questions. Those queries are also turned
" ound r twenty-four
technological exchange will move arChat" ineference was business hours. in that direction as soon as viable. exchanges, but is now being tried again
tried, with few with more likelihood of success, especially in light of the constantly improving technology and the reduction of traditional reference desk hours. The director also consults in person with student government representatives, Ph.D. students, visitors, local community members, and others on a regular basis. The director can anticipate growing trends and issues. It is likely that all the activities not already centered on e- mail or technological exchange will move in that direction as soon as viable. The most popular library service for faculty in the University of Michigan Business School is document retrieval, a service that has been offered for many years, but is changing significantly in the way it is delivered. Originally, the library provided regular print notification on new titles and articles via a new acquisitions list and tables of
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contents, and then the faculty member noted what he or she wanted, or identified items through other means, and sent those requests to the library through inter-campus mail. The library then filled the request through the same inter-campus mail. Now, the library offers a web list of new acquisitions and tables of contents in both print and electronic form (although a rapid change to an all-electronic form is only a matter of time). Faculty members, of course, continue to find other items of interest on their own. They then ask for the items and the library delivers, through print and electronic means. Some of the table of contents and delivery processes are now outsourced and the company that fills requests informs the library of what is reviewed, requested, and filled. From the days when it began in print alone, this service has been the most popular because it meets specific needs in a timely manner and it has enhanced the library's reputation and relationships manyfold. As document delivery makes the transition to the fully electronic form, the list of resources tapped by our customers is being used to dovetail both print and electronic information in the area of collection development. These services may sound familiar, but they are not as familiar as they should be. There is a down side to this. It takes a lot of time to implement. To be effective, we need to know the details of the research and teaching endeavors of our constituents, particularly each individual faculty and Ph.D. member, if the institution is research- focused. We need to know the issues on all our customers' minds along with our customers' latest wish lists. We need to know about new technological endeavors that affect both customers and our own work—course web management, distance learning (our school has programs in Brazil, for example), intellectual property issues, privacy issues, and on and on. If we are not aware of these questions, we will be unable to make recommendations on resources and services that are the "value-added" we supply, and we will be unable to provide the expertise in areas where our customers need support. In addition, all of these data must be gathered in a timely and continuous manner. These above activities are all within the traditional role of librarians where they supply content. Another key factor in our future success is in which new arenas we will perform to find relevant information, given the huge amount of data. I now consider how questions are answered. When asked for the top five articles on a subject, for example, what do librarians normally supply? Five or twenty-five? In our zeal to provide more information because we have found so much, do we avoid making a decision and give our customers everything, or do we analyze the findings and provide the five they asked for? Do we take on the role of analysis? At a meeting of Academic Business Library Directors some years ago, a guest speaker told us that he would never hire a librarian to work for him because if he asked for the top five articles on anything, he would never get them. Further, at a meeting of the Special Libraries Association a few years ago, two corporate librarians argued for outsourcing database searching to non-librarians and spending librarian time on analysis and decisionmaking. Many in the audience objected, horrified that their special skill would be taken over by someone else. I believe this service would be valued in the academic world and would also put us much more on a par with faculty, which many librarians want. This is in spite of the fact that the environment is more conducive to gathering as much information as is available and that librarians are reluctant to give up their database searching and do analytical and decision-making work.
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
In either environment, however, there is a hard-to-measure need to determine what the customer really wants. It takes skill, interpretation, and communication far beyond the technical knowledge that enables the librarian to find the information in the first place. These skills are seriously tested as we attempt to analyze needs and wants across cultures, language differences, geographic distances, and remote communication media. Until fairly recently, I did not find library articles that really addressed the issue of relationship management. But in the March, 2000 issue of Information Outlook, Larry Besant and Deborah Sharp authored an article entitled "Libraries Need Relationship Marketing." Their citations include a mix of sources from business and library literature, reflecting their interdisciplinary thinking, and they outline the benefits of relationship marketing, which they describe as "a deceptively straightforward switcheroo on traditional marketing methods." 12 The benefits include new, increasingly efficient ways to understand and to respond to customers' needs and preferences, resulting in more meaningful connections with customers. For business, the bottom line is reduced costs and increased revenues. For libraries, I would translate that into reduced costs, more meaningful relationships, increased customer numbers, better customer loyalty and retention, and a sure way to prove that libraries and librarians add value. We should consider real relationships and, more importantly, real partnerships where the customer and the librarian are equal players in the information process and each brings expertise to the table. Besant and Sharp combined two different models developed by Adrian Payne and Evert Gummesson and placed them within the library context. Their combined list included:
• Customer markets: new customers and a loyal, long-term client base that evolves
from each service encounter, the electronic relationship, and the knowledge relationship which provides the rationale for alliances • Internal markets: a good working relationship among employees and departments, who are both customers and suppliers, building on interdependencies among internal and external customers • Supplier and alliance markets: relationships with sources; e.g., publishers, system vendors, booksellers, that are based on new approaches and rewards for both • Referral markets: groups that market for you; e.g., word of mouth by satisfied customers (which occurs much faster in the web world), personal and social networks (such as library and non-library conferences we attend), and mass media relationships (where are ours?) • Recruitment markets: getting the best people to do what needs to be done (what are the mental images of the library and librarians and will those images recruit young talent?) • Influence markets: those who can benefit the library, e.g., boards of directors, government officials, influential individuals 13, 14 Besant and Sharp also quote Herbert White, who says that librarians do not market and never have.15 According to White, we count and report. We advertise. We orient and teach. I would further add that we talk to ourselves and not to those outside ourselves, such as the types of people Besant and Sharp quote in their article and the types of people we complain do not understand us. A few years ago, at a meeting of
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academic librarians in Michigan with a state legislator, the latter told the assembled group that they needed to learn the political process in order to be more successful in securing state funding. Afterwards, many librarians complained that he did not understand us or our profession. What they resisted learning was that he held the purse strings, and it was not up to him to learn our process—it was up to us to learn his.
What We Should Do
We need to change, to start with ourselves, to adapt to our ever-changing environment. We need to look at that list of student skills (so prized today by those who are in a position to hire) or some equivalent, to assess how we measure up, and to see if we can move towards the skills we lack. Alternatively, we need to create a compatible composite of individuals who can cover the spectrum of those skills. We need to take risks. We need to read widely, We need to read widely, to seek to seek parallels from other disciplines, parallels from other disciplines, and and to gather meaningful output data. to gather meaningful output data. We need to communicate with people and to do it all the time. We need to be timely and we need to provide the information and analysis that our customers want. Now that there are alternate sources for information; i.e., competition, we need to develop relationships and partnerships that are just as substantive as the resources and services we have spent so long developing. We need to nurture those relationships to create the loyal customer base that will do some of our marketing for us.
Conclusion
In the transformation of libraries, marketing will be the key to our success or failure. By marketing, however, I mean a broad definition of the term that not only includes promotion of libraries and their services, but also extends to customer focus, relationship management, collaboration, pro-active engagement, and the process of getting outside ourselves and our libraries to make an informed and energetic difference. This is antithetical to past practice, but essential for our survival in the digital age. I challenge us to expand our concept of library resources and services to include relationship management, which is equally critical to the success of libraries. The author is Scholarly Communications librarian at the University of Michigan Business School in Ann Arbor.
Notes
1. Irene Braden Hoadley, "Customer service? Not really. (library users are not customers)," College & Research Libraries News (March, 1995): 175-176. 2. The original version of this mission ("connecting content and customers") was developed for the Kresge Business Administration Library by its staff in the mid-1990's.
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3. David P. Fisher, "Is the librarian a distinct personality type? (endeavour to analyse the findings of psychological research conducted over the last 30 years)," Journal of Librarianship (January, 1988): 36-47. 4. Marilyn McDermott, in an e-mail dated March 17, 2000 discussing her presentation at the annual meeting of the Ontario Library Association, October, 1999. 5. Daniel Goleman, presentation at the University of Michigan Business School, Feb. 16, 2000 which was written up in the Monroe Street Journal (March 6, 2000): 6. Also see his Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). 6. Russell Epker. Remarks on behalf of the Corporate Advisory Board at the combined boards meeting of April 7, 2000 at the University of Michigan Business School. Epker is the General Partner of Berkshire Partners, LLC. 7. Robert Knowling. Remarks on behalf of the Visiting Board at the combined boards meeting of April 7, 2000 at the University of Michigan Business School. Knowling is the CEO of Covad Communications. 8. Our indicators were designed to reflect resources, access and services, and included: circulation use of the print collection; electronic use through the number of hits on various databases; the number of reference/information transactions through desk, telephone, email, appointment, etc.; faculty document retrieval use; and a customer survey. A couple of items we used to develop our indicators include: Paul B. Kantor, Objective Performance Measures for Academic and Research Libraries . (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1984); Van House, Nancy. Measuring Academic Library Performance: A Practical Approach. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990); Frank Goudy, "Academic Libraries and the Six Percent Solution: A Twenty-Year Financial Overview," Journal of Academic Librarianship (No. 4, 1993): 212-215. Note: ALA College Standards call for 6% of the college budget to be assigned to libraries; St. Clair, Gloriana. Data from Pennsylvania State University's Benchmarking plan as shared by the author in a fax of Jan. 10, 1994. 9. Recommended by John King, Dean of the School of Information, at a Libraries Advisory Committee meeting, University of Michigan, March 20, 2000. 10. Neil Goldman. "All for One Survival Marketing," Credit Union Management (November, 1999): 46. Mr. Goldman is President of Member Research, a Calabasas, California firm that provides employee and member perception research surveys to the credit union industry. 11. Ibid.: 45-46. 12. Larry X. Besant and Deborah Sharp, "Libraries Need Relationship Marketing," Information Outlook (March, 2000): 17-22. 13. Adrian Payne et al, Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage: Winning and Keeping Customers (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995). 14. Evert Gummesson, "Making Relationship Marketing Operational," International Journal of Service Industry Management (No. 5, 1994): 5-20. 15. Herbert S. White, "Marketing as a Tool for Destabilization," Library Journal (February 15, 1997): 16-17.
doc_404806613.docx
Enterprise relationship management or ERM is a business method in relationship management beyond customer relationship management.
Study on Role of Marketing and Relationship Management
abstract: This paper treats the concepts of marketing and relationship management as they apply to libraries. The author begins with a description of the current situation of libraries, librarians, and customer perceptions, and assesses the library's environment in light of the new realities of the workplace. Relationship management and its importance to the library's future success are defined.
W
hen I first started to think about this topic seriously, it was during a conversation with a businessman from the Czech Republic who was visiting the University of Michigan Business School. I found myself explaining a
great deal about libraries in the United States and answering questions about areas that I might not have thought about if I had been talking to someone from North America. We got into a discussion about new technology and how we were going to keep libraries and librarians relevant. That discussion, along with my belief that we need to be morevisible, pro-active, results-oriented, and customer-focused, led me to consider the concepts of marketing and relationship management as they apply to libraries. I have also been influenced by my thirteen years at the University of Michigan Business School, where marketing and customers are familiar terms.
Terminology
I believe that terms such as marketing and customers are not necessarily comfortable for librarians unless they work in the corporate sector. Library culture tends to talk of patrons and users. In an article in College and Research Libraries News a few years ago, Irene Hoadley objected to the term customer, and subsequent letters to the editor confirmed that she was not alone in her view. Her argument was that patrons, unlike
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2001), pp. 339-350. Copyright © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218.
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The Principles of Marketing and Relationship Management
customers, should be taught to be self-sufficient. How ironic that today, we worry about whether we will be needed when so many people choose to do their own searches on the Internet and often discover something that satisfies them. We tell people that the Internet is chaotic, full of irrelevancies, and As organizations seek greater insufficient for their needs, and advise to use efficiency, even universities and
governments will not support the our expensive,that their searches Wee contentladen resources.
cost of providing resources and services if they are not used and if librarians cannot articulate how their roles add value.
tell them ar rudimentary; therefore, they should be consulting us for more sophisticated, structured search techniques in order to get better results. We believe that our work, our professional mission, is connecting content and customers through access and service. So why aren't they listening? Why aren't they calling upon us constantly? As organizations seek greater efficiency, even universities and governments will not support the cost of providing resources and services if they are not used and if librarians cannot articulate how their roles add value.
Perceptions of the Profession
The conventional view of the librarian is that she is a shy, retiring, bookish person who does not take charge, does not make decisions, and does not assert herself. Librarianship is assumed to be primarily a female profession, at least in North America, further stereotyping the general image and assumptions about librarians. In 1988, David Fisher analyzed the findings of psychological research conducted over the previous thirty years to determine if there was a distinct personality type for librarians. He discovered that there was no evidence to support that assumption, but he also discovered that librarians seem to want to make things worse for themselves and confirm the stereotypes. In October 1999, at a meeting of the Ontario Library Association, Marilyn McDermott, of Mohawk College proposed that the personality type likely to choose librarianship as a career, based on her personal observation (confirming Fisher's conclusion about reinforcing stereotypes), and the major research connecting type to careers/occupations, is not the personality type needed to succeed in the "new" academic library environment. According to McDermott, the Myers Briggs personality type test is being used extensively in corporate America to match and move employees into jobs that make sense for their personality types. Richard Bolles' scheme, which links to "Holland codes" (standard research for occupational decision-making and matching), is also used. McDermott's argument is that library schools and library managers should take into account this research when recruiting and making decisions about selection and placement. Daniel Goleman, best known for his book Emotional Intelligence, has another view. Speaking at the University of Michigan Business School in spring 2000, he discussed the skills that enhance professional effectiveness, career success, and organizational performance. In addition to technical competence and cognitive abilities, there is
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emotional intelligence, which includes personal competence skills and social competence skills. Contrary to McDermott, Goleman is not in favor of personality testing by corporations because people can change over a lifetime and be labeled inappropriately. He believes such tests are valuable for self-development only. As a result, those of us in the profession today must decide what they are best suited for, how they can develop personally, and how they can move into this new paradigm, which is clearly more overt, more pro-active, and more competitive than it has been. Librarians must also be prepared to deal with the problems they encounter and that will not be easy. Above all, librarians must be willing to change.
Our Environments and Defining Our Profession
In addition to stereotypes, we are confronted with managing our environments and defining our profession. Librarianship in the United States takes so many forms it is not surprising that non-librarians have trouble understanding who we are and what we do. We do not necessarily agree on our mission and core values. What is the common denominator among the following?
• A school librarian with a $10,000 annual budget spends the day with elementary • An academic librarian manages a $2M annual information budget and runs a
complex technical services operation with traditional and nontraditional information. • A public librarian in a medium-sized town offers children's reading hour, supports the information needs of everyone from gardeners to local business persons, deals with the homeless, and negotiates local politics through a public library board. • A corporate librarian in an international banking operation runs a library that never closes, has branches in various geographic locations, focuses heavily on reference, and provides answers with an average turnaround time of thirty three minutes per question. • An information specialist at a "dot com" company manages a small group involved in selecting content, designing web pages, programming, and other related activities. • A student attends the School of Information at the University of Michigan and chooses among the following graduate programs: archives and records management; human computer interaction; information economics, management and policy; library and information services. The answer lies in connecting content and customers through access and service. From the outside looking in, that mission is less easy to discern. Just as our environments differ, so does the way we work. Collaboration, consultation, consensus, and elaborate processes have been my personal experience as an academic librarian in three different institutions in two different countries. We decide things by committee. I assume that a corporate librarian attends far fewer meetings than an academic librarian and because the culture is different, the corporate librarian can make many more decisions students in an inner city, struggling with the basics of literacy.
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independently and more quickly. For the information specialist, neither way of working has the least relevance. Speed is the key.
Whom We Serve
At the University of Michigan Business School, the primary customers are the school's faculty, students, and staff. The library also serves the larger campus and the community at large, as a publicly-funded university, but the primary customers are a distinct group. Looking at student behavior is valuable to a discussion of user as customer because ultimately students will be community leaders, corporate movers and shakers, university faculty, and citizens generally. The University of Michigan Business School hosts an annual combined meeting of its four advisory boards. During the meeting in April, 2000, Russell Epker, speaking on behalf of our Corporate Board, which represents companies that hire our graduates, told us about the skill set board members want to see in students who will later come to their companies:
• • • • • • • • • •
ability to communicate ability to build relationships diversity (cultural background) • willingness to take risks creativity multi disciplinary capability ability to work at e-speed high intellectual capability real caring for other people (instead of the "me" generation) leadership (not hierarchical, but innate) team player abilities
How well do librarians measure up to these characteristics? It is useful to compare them to the characteristics of people in your organizations, the customers you serve, and the organizations themselves. This is the new reality as defined by representatives of the business world. We are beginning to feel its presence in academe as we see business leaders take the helm of universities (e.g., Michigan State University) and as we see public pressure mounting on academic institutions to be more accountable for everything from the dollars they spend to the capability of their graduates. Note, also, that communication is at the top of the list, followed by relationship building. Later in the same program, our Visiting Committee spoke to the issue of speed by complaining about the bureaucracy of government and universities. The spokesman, Bob Knowling, gave us his own lesson on speed. His company sought to acquire another company whose shares were trading at $27/share. By the time they were ready to make the deal, some four weeks later, the shares were at $127/share and he could not close the deal. The next time he wanted to acquire a company, he told his staff that they had four days to make the decision. If everyone else is communicating and moving at espeed, we need to do it, too.
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Data Gathering
The profession has argued endlessly for the collection of more effective data, but we are far from achieving that on a regular basis. Just as we have succeeded in implementing library automation systems that can provide us with use data on print materials for collection development purposes, we turn to the electronic world. Just as we create in-house CDROM networks where we can gather hit rates The profession has argued and get some sense of peak period usage, we turn to endlessly for the collection of with the Web and rely on vendors to provide us more effective data, but we use data. We even build that requirement into our contracts, but somehow we do not are far from achieving that on always get it. Of course, there is a conflict of interest a regular basis. inherent in relying on a vendor for such data. If use is high, the vendor will be happy to tell you. What a good argument for renewing or increasing your purchase! If use is low, however, what incentive does a vendor have for letting you know? You might cancel your subscription. What kind of relationship is this? It is fine to rely on your vendor person for appropriate information, but this is not relationship management in a business environment. The profession has spent decades on data. At base, there are standards from various national associations and data gathering by various groups, but they still hold to the following—they are input in nature (number of volumes bought, number of books checked out), rather than output in nature (what percentage of reference questions actually provides the information sought; does the web visitor reach the correct information for the question being researched). Meaningful data are also difficult to collect and lag behind the technological revolution. Librarians even disagree on what to collect. When the Dean of the Business School introduced the concept of Quality Indicators to our community, we in the library found the process very painful. In spite of our research, we could never quite make the process fit. After a few years, the Dean dropped this concept for a number of units, including the library. We lacked enough quality output data and our profession's standards lacked credibility because the source and rationale for them are unclear. The most valuable element, from an output measure, were the comments on our customer survey, where we could identify specific concerns and address them one by one as a form of relationship management. Why are data important to marketing and relationship management? They are important because they foster fact-based decision-making and enable us to find parallels and benchmarks across industries—whether they are service industries, like ours, or industries that are based on products, also like ours. Consider the sources we use to foster ideas. Reading the literature of librarianship is valuable, as is communicating with our colleagues, but what about literatures and people outside our own field? In my first library automation experience, back in the mid-1980s, I urged my colleagues to explore the airline industry because I saw parallels in our inventory control requirements. It had never occurred to them to consider this. The need to pursue information in other disciplines in this growing interdisciplinary age is critical, as is the need to build relationships
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outside the library profession. Read a business journal. Talk to someone in the retail business. Find a parallel or a colleague in industrial engineering, a field often applied by the Dean of the University of Michigan's School of Information. 9 Seek reading and relationships outside librarianship to add dimension and value to your perspective.
Moving Towards Marketing and Relationship Management
With this framework in mind, we can now consider marketing, a concept that has been with the business world since its beginning, and relationship management, a relatively new idea that has emerged as a key component in marketing strategy. When looking for an all-encompassing quote, I chose the following:
At its most basic level, every member transaction, every interaction, every connection . . . — positive or negative—is marketing. In a strategic context, marketing drives the entire decision-making process and requires research that is objective, comprehensive and continuous. Marketing is strategic on one hand, the responsibility of everyone on the other. It is a philosophy, not a job —a way of thinking, not a department.10
This quote is from Neil Goldman, who works in the credit union industry, and I chose it for its focus on one-on-one relationships, strategy, continuous data gathering, and attitude/philosophy, all expressed in a very short statement. It is also relatively easy to translate to the library world. For example, what is a reference transaction but a one-on-one relationship? What is key here, however, is that the relationship stretches far beyond the reference transaction and it starts with the impression customers have when they walk in the door and see—what? What do your customers see when they walk in the physical door or the "web door?" Are these doors connected in theme and style? Have you tried walking in your own doors lately with an attempt to see them as if you had never seen them before? What do the signs say? What does the entrance or home page look like? What are visible staff members doing? How prominent are connections to staff or to help on your website? Go through the rest of the building or website with the same critical eye. Ask someone, a customer, to do it for you. Better yet, ask more than one. Make sure they are not librarians. What do your customers hear when they call on the telephone or read when they receive e-mail from your staff? When I was a library director, I made a point of calling our telephone entry points at least once or twice a term to find out what responses were being given. This is particularly important in that library's environment where there are approximately fifty to sixty student temporary staff working on the front lines. Regardless of the medium of communication, do you work to establish "brand identity?" Over the last few years, our School has worked to imprint its identity in people's minds. If I refer to "Coca Cola," you can see the logo in your mind and you know exactly what I mean whether you are in Atlanta, Georgia, the company's headquarters, or the Czech Republic. This should be your goal. Our school logo and name are used consistently and no area is allowed to deviate, including the library, which is a part of the school, not a part of the main campus library. The phones are answered with "University of Michigan Business School," then "Library" or "Kresge
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Business Administration Library." It is everyone's job to participate in imprinting the brand name and brand identity on customers. As a profession, we have long wanted to help people and we have focused carefully on providing information, but we have not paid such close attention to the details that As a profession, we have long can actually make or break us. wanted to help people and we To complicate matters further, the electronic world, in whatever form it eventually have focused carefully on takes, brings a whole new set of enterprises — providing information, but we information architecture, web design, content have not paid such close selection, changes in writing requirements, new elements for organizing the content, etc. The attention to the details that very concept of a physical library may or may not can actually make or break us. hold, but the mission is still the same — connecting content and customers through access and service. It is important to imbed marketing into this new enterprise from the beginning and not as an afterthought. Let us not repeat our historical mistake. Returning to data-gathering for a moment, Neil Goldman writes:
Quality, objective research is what allows marketing to be so effective. Without it —without knowing what member perceptions are and why —any strategic decision executed in the name of "marketing" is a pure gamble. As the old adage says, "You can't manage what you don't measure." Similarly, you can't fix what you don't know is broken. Without objective, quantifiable data to guide it, true marketing is impossible, and the organization as a whole is blind.11
Goldman is President of a firm that provides employee and member perception research surveys to the credit union industry. Naturally he is in favor of research. But note that what he is discussing is perceptions. I began with a discussion about the perception of librarians, both from librarian and external perspectives. I will broaden that to consider the full array of customer perceptions. Research does not necessarily always have to be about counting, although numerical data can be useful. Research also can include surveys or focus groups or one-on-one transactions. In the University of Michigan Business School's library, librarians are each assigned as liaisons to sub-areas of the School. One might be responsible for accounting and finance, for example, while another focuses on organizational behavior and human resources management. One liaison duty is to connect at least once a year, one-on-one, with each faculty member for a discussion about research, teaching, and other interests, and to solicit feedback on library resources and services. What resources and services do they need that they lack now? Liaisons consult regularly, often by e-mail, to notify faculty of new print and electronic resources. Further, when the library seeks to contain its budget by canceling subscriptions, the starting point is a list of least-used items (both from circulation and inhouse use counts) followed by consultation with faculty and, where relevant, Ph.D. students. This builds trust, which will be particularly important as everyone communicates less and less through traditional contact and more and more through remote means.
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How will we handle marketing to remote users? How will we build trust in customers who communicate primarily through e-mail to a "library" mailbox? More than ever, it will be important to reach these users in some personal way. If we are lucky, we will already have relationships established and will be able to foster and promote them remotely. If we do not, we will have to find some way to interact with people one-on-one, finding out about their research and interests, and helping to enhance their work. In the end, we may find ourselves in the modern equivalent of an earlier era when people communicated by letter. The difference is that we will not have to wait weeks for the letters to go back and forth. The development of greater sophistication in technologies that permit voice and video to accompany text will return us to a closer equivalent of an in-person exchange, but it will not be the same. In the end, we will not only need to learn about our customers' research and information interests, but we will also have to discover how each of them prefers to interact—e-mail, telephone, video/voice/text combinations, in person, or in some way yet to be invented. These preferences may be inherent to each customer or may shift with generations, a subject too lengthy to explore in this article. We may find ourselves making appointments with customers for a long distance exchange, or planning to visit them at some designated location—office, home, café. Perhaps we will involve ourselves in more long-term assistance, working closely in person with a customer for a day or two and continuing the assistance by intermittent e-mail and telephone exchange. With another customer, we might have a short introduction via e- mail, but a long-term, multitechnological set of exchanges over the course of many months. Many combinations are possible. In addition to the liaison model at the Kresge Library, another key customer-focused activity is a lively suggestion board. Each submission receives a response within twenty- four business hours and responses are posted. The director sees a copy of every suggestion and every answer, in addition to responding to appropriate topics that should be handled by a director. The library e-mail address experiences a great deal of traffic, both in terms of suggestions and reference It is likely that all the activities
not already centered on e-mail or questions. Those queries are also turned
" ound r twenty-four
technological exchange will move arChat" ineference was business hours. in that direction as soon as viable. exchanges, but is now being tried again
tried, with few with more likelihood of success, especially in light of the constantly improving technology and the reduction of traditional reference desk hours. The director also consults in person with student government representatives, Ph.D. students, visitors, local community members, and others on a regular basis. The director can anticipate growing trends and issues. It is likely that all the activities not already centered on e- mail or technological exchange will move in that direction as soon as viable. The most popular library service for faculty in the University of Michigan Business School is document retrieval, a service that has been offered for many years, but is changing significantly in the way it is delivered. Originally, the library provided regular print notification on new titles and articles via a new acquisitions list and tables of
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contents, and then the faculty member noted what he or she wanted, or identified items through other means, and sent those requests to the library through inter-campus mail. The library then filled the request through the same inter-campus mail. Now, the library offers a web list of new acquisitions and tables of contents in both print and electronic form (although a rapid change to an all-electronic form is only a matter of time). Faculty members, of course, continue to find other items of interest on their own. They then ask for the items and the library delivers, through print and electronic means. Some of the table of contents and delivery processes are now outsourced and the company that fills requests informs the library of what is reviewed, requested, and filled. From the days when it began in print alone, this service has been the most popular because it meets specific needs in a timely manner and it has enhanced the library's reputation and relationships manyfold. As document delivery makes the transition to the fully electronic form, the list of resources tapped by our customers is being used to dovetail both print and electronic information in the area of collection development. These services may sound familiar, but they are not as familiar as they should be. There is a down side to this. It takes a lot of time to implement. To be effective, we need to know the details of the research and teaching endeavors of our constituents, particularly each individual faculty and Ph.D. member, if the institution is research- focused. We need to know the issues on all our customers' minds along with our customers' latest wish lists. We need to know about new technological endeavors that affect both customers and our own work—course web management, distance learning (our school has programs in Brazil, for example), intellectual property issues, privacy issues, and on and on. If we are not aware of these questions, we will be unable to make recommendations on resources and services that are the "value-added" we supply, and we will be unable to provide the expertise in areas where our customers need support. In addition, all of these data must be gathered in a timely and continuous manner. These above activities are all within the traditional role of librarians where they supply content. Another key factor in our future success is in which new arenas we will perform to find relevant information, given the huge amount of data. I now consider how questions are answered. When asked for the top five articles on a subject, for example, what do librarians normally supply? Five or twenty-five? In our zeal to provide more information because we have found so much, do we avoid making a decision and give our customers everything, or do we analyze the findings and provide the five they asked for? Do we take on the role of analysis? At a meeting of Academic Business Library Directors some years ago, a guest speaker told us that he would never hire a librarian to work for him because if he asked for the top five articles on anything, he would never get them. Further, at a meeting of the Special Libraries Association a few years ago, two corporate librarians argued for outsourcing database searching to non-librarians and spending librarian time on analysis and decisionmaking. Many in the audience objected, horrified that their special skill would be taken over by someone else. I believe this service would be valued in the academic world and would also put us much more on a par with faculty, which many librarians want. This is in spite of the fact that the environment is more conducive to gathering as much information as is available and that librarians are reluctant to give up their database searching and do analytical and decision-making work.
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In either environment, however, there is a hard-to-measure need to determine what the customer really wants. It takes skill, interpretation, and communication far beyond the technical knowledge that enables the librarian to find the information in the first place. These skills are seriously tested as we attempt to analyze needs and wants across cultures, language differences, geographic distances, and remote communication media. Until fairly recently, I did not find library articles that really addressed the issue of relationship management. But in the March, 2000 issue of Information Outlook, Larry Besant and Deborah Sharp authored an article entitled "Libraries Need Relationship Marketing." Their citations include a mix of sources from business and library literature, reflecting their interdisciplinary thinking, and they outline the benefits of relationship marketing, which they describe as "a deceptively straightforward switcheroo on traditional marketing methods." 12 The benefits include new, increasingly efficient ways to understand and to respond to customers' needs and preferences, resulting in more meaningful connections with customers. For business, the bottom line is reduced costs and increased revenues. For libraries, I would translate that into reduced costs, more meaningful relationships, increased customer numbers, better customer loyalty and retention, and a sure way to prove that libraries and librarians add value. We should consider real relationships and, more importantly, real partnerships where the customer and the librarian are equal players in the information process and each brings expertise to the table. Besant and Sharp combined two different models developed by Adrian Payne and Evert Gummesson and placed them within the library context. Their combined list included:
• Customer markets: new customers and a loyal, long-term client base that evolves
from each service encounter, the electronic relationship, and the knowledge relationship which provides the rationale for alliances • Internal markets: a good working relationship among employees and departments, who are both customers and suppliers, building on interdependencies among internal and external customers • Supplier and alliance markets: relationships with sources; e.g., publishers, system vendors, booksellers, that are based on new approaches and rewards for both • Referral markets: groups that market for you; e.g., word of mouth by satisfied customers (which occurs much faster in the web world), personal and social networks (such as library and non-library conferences we attend), and mass media relationships (where are ours?) • Recruitment markets: getting the best people to do what needs to be done (what are the mental images of the library and librarians and will those images recruit young talent?) • Influence markets: those who can benefit the library, e.g., boards of directors, government officials, influential individuals 13, 14 Besant and Sharp also quote Herbert White, who says that librarians do not market and never have.15 According to White, we count and report. We advertise. We orient and teach. I would further add that we talk to ourselves and not to those outside ourselves, such as the types of people Besant and Sharp quote in their article and the types of people we complain do not understand us. A few years ago, at a meeting of
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academic librarians in Michigan with a state legislator, the latter told the assembled group that they needed to learn the political process in order to be more successful in securing state funding. Afterwards, many librarians complained that he did not understand us or our profession. What they resisted learning was that he held the purse strings, and it was not up to him to learn our process—it was up to us to learn his.
What We Should Do
We need to change, to start with ourselves, to adapt to our ever-changing environment. We need to look at that list of student skills (so prized today by those who are in a position to hire) or some equivalent, to assess how we measure up, and to see if we can move towards the skills we lack. Alternatively, we need to create a compatible composite of individuals who can cover the spectrum of those skills. We need to take risks. We need to read widely, We need to read widely, to seek to seek parallels from other disciplines, parallels from other disciplines, and and to gather meaningful output data. to gather meaningful output data. We need to communicate with people and to do it all the time. We need to be timely and we need to provide the information and analysis that our customers want. Now that there are alternate sources for information; i.e., competition, we need to develop relationships and partnerships that are just as substantive as the resources and services we have spent so long developing. We need to nurture those relationships to create the loyal customer base that will do some of our marketing for us.
Conclusion
In the transformation of libraries, marketing will be the key to our success or failure. By marketing, however, I mean a broad definition of the term that not only includes promotion of libraries and their services, but also extends to customer focus, relationship management, collaboration, pro-active engagement, and the process of getting outside ourselves and our libraries to make an informed and energetic difference. This is antithetical to past practice, but essential for our survival in the digital age. I challenge us to expand our concept of library resources and services to include relationship management, which is equally critical to the success of libraries. The author is Scholarly Communications librarian at the University of Michigan Business School in Ann Arbor.
Notes
1. Irene Braden Hoadley, "Customer service? Not really. (library users are not customers)," College & Research Libraries News (March, 1995): 175-176. 2. The original version of this mission ("connecting content and customers") was developed for the Kresge Business Administration Library by its staff in the mid-1990's.
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3. David P. Fisher, "Is the librarian a distinct personality type? (endeavour to analyse the findings of psychological research conducted over the last 30 years)," Journal of Librarianship (January, 1988): 36-47. 4. Marilyn McDermott, in an e-mail dated March 17, 2000 discussing her presentation at the annual meeting of the Ontario Library Association, October, 1999. 5. Daniel Goleman, presentation at the University of Michigan Business School, Feb. 16, 2000 which was written up in the Monroe Street Journal (March 6, 2000): 6. Also see his Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). 6. Russell Epker. Remarks on behalf of the Corporate Advisory Board at the combined boards meeting of April 7, 2000 at the University of Michigan Business School. Epker is the General Partner of Berkshire Partners, LLC. 7. Robert Knowling. Remarks on behalf of the Visiting Board at the combined boards meeting of April 7, 2000 at the University of Michigan Business School. Knowling is the CEO of Covad Communications. 8. Our indicators were designed to reflect resources, access and services, and included: circulation use of the print collection; electronic use through the number of hits on various databases; the number of reference/information transactions through desk, telephone, email, appointment, etc.; faculty document retrieval use; and a customer survey. A couple of items we used to develop our indicators include: Paul B. Kantor, Objective Performance Measures for Academic and Research Libraries . (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1984); Van House, Nancy. Measuring Academic Library Performance: A Practical Approach. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990); Frank Goudy, "Academic Libraries and the Six Percent Solution: A Twenty-Year Financial Overview," Journal of Academic Librarianship (No. 4, 1993): 212-215. Note: ALA College Standards call for 6% of the college budget to be assigned to libraries; St. Clair, Gloriana. Data from Pennsylvania State University's Benchmarking plan as shared by the author in a fax of Jan. 10, 1994. 9. Recommended by John King, Dean of the School of Information, at a Libraries Advisory Committee meeting, University of Michigan, March 20, 2000. 10. Neil Goldman. "All for One Survival Marketing," Credit Union Management (November, 1999): 46. Mr. Goldman is President of Member Research, a Calabasas, California firm that provides employee and member perception research surveys to the credit union industry. 11. Ibid.: 45-46. 12. Larry X. Besant and Deborah Sharp, "Libraries Need Relationship Marketing," Information Outlook (March, 2000): 17-22. 13. Adrian Payne et al, Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage: Winning and Keeping Customers (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995). 14. Evert Gummesson, "Making Relationship Marketing Operational," International Journal of Service Industry Management (No. 5, 1994): 5-20. 15. Herbert S. White, "Marketing as a Tool for Destabilization," Library Journal (February 15, 1997): 16-17.
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