Thursday, May 7, 2009

Did you just drop out of marketing?

If you changed your class schedules around, or thought that marketing class would be a snooze, read what Meredith Farkas had to say about the importance of the sales pitch to academic librarians. Maybe it's because we don't like the word marketing, we don't like selling stuff, we don't like thinking of ourselves or knowledge as a product.

But that's the problem: the people who are buying from us do think of our services and knowledge as a product. And they understand that terminology when you begin to use it. You don't have to reinvent new words to sell something or persuade a person to understand that point. Someone has already spun that wheel.

And here is the real kicker: if it doesn't look like librarians can handle their own sales, they will hire a marketer to do it.

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