Marketing strategy of public and academic library, Case Study

Kulovany, Lukas and Soukup, Jan (2007) Marketing strategy of public and academic library, Case Study. In Papik, Richard and Simon, Ingeborg, Eds. Proceedings Bobcatsss 15th Symposium, Marketing of Information Services, pages pp. 464-470, Prague.

Abstract

Not a long time ago, marketing was almost unrecognised and surely marginalised conception for libraries. Nowadays the situation is changing for the better. The libraries tend to slowly change their old passive management strategy for active market behaviour, there is a tendency to „go an extra mile for the client“. In my opinion it is the only way how to compare favourably in current competitive environment and not become obsolete and outmoded. The aim of this case study is to compare the marketing of two different sorts of libraries – academic library and public library. For the academic library we have chosen the SWOT analysis type of survey, for the public library the „four P“method. Considering the dissimilarity of those two sorts of libraries we regard the methods as the most appropriate. The objective of our case study is to verify the presumption that the public library has to make much bigger effort in its active market behaviour than the academic library.