Just another dent in the damage...

Workshop Four: Your library brand and the student experience

Generally speaking we (as information professionals) concentrate on circulating information about our services but tend to lack a strong library brand to market them effectively. Emma Illingworth and Jo Alcock suggest we need strong strategic input to create a brand that maintains and promotes awareness of services that our users easily recognise (I agree).

When asked to think about what our library brand is, what this conveys to the student and how we communicate it, it was clear to me that we seem to be falling short of the mark. Sure, we have the headed paper, the university shield, that gives our institution its visual identity but where does the library fit into this? At the moment I don’t particularly think it does. We don’t have a logo or a short snappy tagline (that I know of) – we have our soon to be replaced Shared Vision. But what student really takes any of this on board? We know our students are using the services we provide (see the annual report) but do they know? In a perfect world our brand would be all over our electronic resources, in bold flashing animated gifs (maybe). But would our providers allow this? Probably not.

The Library Brand

What kind of message do we want our brand to promote? That we are welcoming, friendly librarians who are there, willing to help? How can we market this? For Jo the brand is who we are and what we offer and the most authentic brands emanate from what the organisation does (see Starbucks – coffee, people and places).

Branding is the process of defining a library story. Distilling that into a short appealing sentence… then visually conveying the story (Doucett, 2009).

It’s creating a visual representation of your value to rouse emotion in your users, rendering your service meaningful. The example Jo used to highlight this was Wolverhampton’s Infobites (see slide 6 of the presentation).

• Visual – Information skills workshops at Learning Centres;
• Value – Development of information skills;
• Emotional – Library can help you develop skills important to students.

The session’s aim wasn’t to provide participants with a how-to guide about creating library brands but rather to get us thinking about what a library brand should be and how this impacts the student experience.

Points to note

• Offer clear, meaningful, unique messages;
• Make the message consistent;
• Get staff onboard and ensure their commitment to the message;
• Don’t back away from the constant effort needed to maintain your brand;
• Include visual elements to complement the message.

Some more branding examples:

• Visual – The Information Literacy logo;
• Message – The University of Huddersfield;
• Library spaces – The University of East London;
• Consistency – The University of Warwick.

The Student Experience

Emma moved on during the next part of the workshop to discuss the elements that make up the student experience – their needs, how our services meet these needs and the brand perception. It should be the aim of the library to meet these needs (academic, social, recreational or rejuvenating) wherever applicable. Create services determined by what your user needs, not what the library has (hat tip Matthews, 2009 and Mi, 2006). Do we ever ask our users what they need? Do we design services around those needs or just by what’s on offer?

It seems obvious to me to start at the beginning – identify student needs before embarking on service design or redevelopment, collaborate with departments that convey your brand perception and be consistent in the visual material used to promote your new partnerships. Everything you do will impact the student experience and if you want that to be a good one then you better find out what your users want. And remember, just because you came out on top this time doesn’t you will next time. There’s always room for improvement.

Conclusion

Having a consistent and effective library brand is important if you value the impact your service has on the student experience.

More info

Presentation slides are available now on Slideshare and the hashtag used during the session was #lbse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Libraries and tagged as branding, cilip, cofhe, exeter10, marketing, student experience, uc&r. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.