The Marketing of University Libraries : Mission and Subject, Structure, Consequences, Analyses and Controls

The main subject with this master thesis is to take a closer look at university libraries specially Gothenburg University Librarys operation of marketing the librarys user contact, how it receives various users demands and carry out the interactive and strategic marketing. Marketing is planning, structuring, implementation, analysis and controls of carefully formulated programs, designed to bring voluntary interactions and relations with the target markets, for the purpose of achieving organisational and user satisfaction objectives. The structure of this thesis covers three main parts. Part I reflects the researchers approach to the subject. Marketing researchers such as Grönroos, Kotler, Bryson, De Sáez and Gummesson among others are presented. This part moves on to consider and tell the basic theory of the thesis. Part II describes and analyses our empirical studies which are the interviews. Part III compares the theories of above mentioned researchers approach with the results of our interviews, puts the relationship between the librarys information services and users in the marketing context. Our study shows that the service organisations usually do not have any official documents or plans for their marketing strategies, even though they carry out certain marketing efforts toward their primary groups.Uppsatsnivå: