Marketing Management (offered by University of Auckland – Short Courses)

Greg Morgan, service planning & enhancement management manager attended a short course at University of Auckland on Marketing Management.

Steve Bridges is something of a NZ marketing practice guru. That said, he is an American who has had considerable experience as an academic as well as generalist marketing consultant. Steve migrated to teach the first university marketing course in this country in the early 1970s (at Victoria) and was for a time professor of marketing at Massey University. This two day course aims to give participants an overview of sound principles and practice that would normally take about 70 hours of teaching and learning time.

The course objectives were:

• to learn or refresh the basic principles of marketing
• to enable us to critique our own organisation's approach to marketing

For me this was a very timely course given the customer-centric model adopted by Auckland City Libraries and eLGAR libraries taking the step to walk in our customers' shoes - in fact, exactly that language kept popping up in the course of discussion. Working from textbook theory and a wealth of real world case studies, Steve first got us to think about "pseudo marketing". That is the kind of production, product or sales orientated activity which, because it is so visible, can sometimes seem to be all that marketing is about.

Real marketing, however is the down to earth business of identifying and satisfying customers' needs and wants at a profit. In a library context better language might be, solving customers' problems "profitablity". It follows that true marketing is a consumer-customer or client-centric activity.

And it is a philosophy. Ghandi:
"The customer is the most important visitior on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. She is not an interruption to our work - but the purpose of it"

We explored case studies of how (negatively) organisations sometimes copy the form but not the substance of marketing and when (postively) the marketing manager acts internally as both consumer's advocate and integrator. Advice is absolutely to seat the small stuff, to invest in client-friendly practises and to treat staff too as customers.

The course looked at the component parts of a maketing plan, and this section was full of illumination. I really enjoyed working through hypothetical cases:

• trying to picture distinct customer segments
• creating a hypothesis for each (what is the particular problem they'd loved solved? teh benefit they would like?)
• thinking about appropriate marketing mix of products and/or services to deliver a solution of new customer benefit.

Customer-centric thinking leads us to understand that people are seeking benefits or solutions to problems, not products or services as such. It was interesting to reflect upon the reality that the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is not necessarily a customer-centric philosophy...How good in practice are various kinds of organisation at market segmentation (understanding different customer groups) rather than the aggregation approach of one service for all? How knowledgeably can we differentiate our customer base by geography, demographics, psychographics factors (eg lifestyle, personality) and demonstrated behavious?

Do we understand customer behaviour? Do people's apparently rational answers to surveys really connect with the true feelings and emotions? Do we assume that humans are happy decision makers? The reverse is true - we don't like making decisions and avoid or subvert them. How do customers make choices? How can we in the way we relate to customers reduce or eliminate the anxiety they feel around deciding whether to use our services?

Negative customer feedback is especially valuable to the development of relationships that build detractors who care into loyal customer-advocates. In taking a quick look at market research we reviewed the pros and cons of tools such as focus group interviews, telephone surveys, mail surveys, door to door and web based surveying. We thought about how to make research pertinent, ethical and cost effective.

The course rounded off with sections on branding, marketing communications and social media. Each session was relevant to library service, and to an organisation which has for a long time put resource into understanding the library related preferences of users as well as non users.

Superbly presented and accompanied by carefully selected references to further reading and online resources, this course was just right for me at this time. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of my current role. Further more, it left me confident that I actually know a bit more about marketing approaches than I might have thought. After all, as customers we are epxerts of our own experience.