rebranding or repostioning – or both?
I have been thinking a lot lately about marketing, as 1 of 6 assignments due in two weeks time is on that very theme.
I recently commented that there might be a danger in L2 applications making the library invisable. In this brave ‘two’ world 
, where our services are delivered seamlessly to users at a time and place that is convenient to them, the library is acting as a gateway to the content that the user really wants.
They don’t want ‘to go to the library’ they probably don’t particularly care if the library comes to them as such. As long as the information that the user needs is available to them in a format that they can digest or use, then they are happy. If that means a book is the best format, then that’s great. But equally that may be a digital resource.
In a talk by John L. Needham of Google at the LiS show last thursday, he commented that google wants people to spend as little time on their site as possible. Inevitably this is a business decision, the more people that spend time ‘clicking through’, then the more advertising revenue. He even admited that Google wanted to open their services to the Chinese market as soon as possible, somthing to do with the amount of people who live there me thinks! This gives us in the library world pause for thought. Perhaps the click through is what counts, a statistic that can be used to justify our existence to the bean counters.
Those digital resources, are often accesed through either an a-z listing such as here or through a glorified listing with limited search capabilities such as metalib. from this point of view the library is visible and is clearly acting as the launch point for the service. This is good, and an excellent place to put that shiny new branding, but not essential.
My experience of a library induction at the university I am studying at is non-existant. There was no induction! We were left with the impression that, because we were postgraduate students on an information and library management masters, we would know all we needed to know already. Quite frankly, a single hours session that outlined the basic facilities that we as PGs would be likely to use would have taken, well an hour and been enough to raise awareness of the library’s services.
How hard is it to say “this is the library, not only do we provide the stacks that you see here, but next time you are searching in google scholar within campus, or when you are logged in to you athens account, your search results in google include links that will take you into any fulltext sources that we subscribe to. This is the nature of the joined up systems that we are offering to you; You click, you get something.”
Incidently, Google scholar is the ONLY google related link that is included in the default Internet Explorer favourites within the university. (We don’t have our own windows profiles)
So back to the title of this post, rebranding or repostioning – or both?  I think the rebranding should not be the end in itself. How many times have we seen costly rebranding that did little to address the fundamental repostioning of a service that should have been taking place to met the changes in the users circumstances?
Consignia anyone?