Product Value

How do customers look at products?

Features and benefits

Customers purchasing products from a commercial enterprise look for special features such as variety, quality, design, and sizes (scope) and benefits such as good performance, reliability and durability. They also demand quality, high performance -- and products should look good, too! Library users expect the same things from library services.

Performance and quality

For example, libraries provide outstanding reference service. Does it meet user needs, do users always get answers when they need them, and is service always courteous and prompt? Library surveys sometimes indicate that users don't always get the right answers! For those users, the product has poor performance or lacks quality.

On the other hand, you know that the library has databases that are better than Web searching for finding quality information, i.e. that the quality and performance of the databases is superior to search engine retrieval. How do you communicate that value to the users?

Durability and reliability

Our users need to count on us, on the reliability of our products. We need to ask the same questions our users ask:

• Is the library open when our users need services?

• If not, do we provide alternate online 24/7 access?

• Are there branches located where needed?

• Are collections easy to access and are our circulation systems optimized for users?

• Are our catalog systems accurate, reliable, and easy to use?

Image and trends

Our users look for more than durability and reliability - they want the latest and the best. Maybe even fun! Does using the library's products give users the same satisfaction as a visit to a bookstore with colorful displays arranged by subject and a comfortable place to sit and have coffee while reading? Is a video as easy to find in the stacks as it is at the local video store? Can we provide the online access that is demanded for lifestyles of today's users who shop online, bank online, get medical advice, fall in love, and communicate with the world online? Maybe not, but quality, reliability, great service, and networked availability of information are of value, and libraries do those things very well! Marketing lets our users know.

We need to communicate product features (variety, quality, design, scope) and value (reliability, quality, performance, durability, image, trends) to the community, and market what the library does best -- in ways that will appeal to our customers.

Be brave! Ask a few friends or family members to describe their understanding of some library services to you.

• For example, ask them what interlibrary loan is.
• Ask them what they think a reference department can do for them.
• Ask them what databases the library has and which of them would be most helpful.
• Ask them if they can get free full-text articles at the library that aren't available on the Internet.
• Compare their answers and compare the answers with your understanding of the services. Any differences?

Place.