Christie Koontz, Ph.D., contributed a column called Customer-Based Marketing for MLS from 2002 through 2010. During that time, she was a research associate at Florida State University, and she taught marketing for FSU’s School of Information Studies, as well as remotely for San Jose State University. As a member of IFLA’s Management and Marketing Section, she’s worked with librarians around the globe. After traveling to far-off IFLA conferences, Christie often wrote coverage for MLS, including her experiences at the ceremonies for IFLA’s International Marketing Award. Now retired, Christie is still active in libraries.

Even as marketing stabilizes as a known quantity in the library community, it continues to get a bad rap, as it is more often perceived as sales.

An advertising colleague once told me that the average person in the U.S. is bombarded with some 1,800 marketing messages per day, from roadside promotional signs to magazines, radio, and, more recently, internet advertisements. It seems someone is always trying to persuade us to buy something. Yet while persuasion may work fine the first time around, it is only the satisfied customer who buys again, or, in our world, uses the library again.

“True marketing is a repetitive process, a systematic approach for matching services and products to a customer’s wants, needs, and desires. It rolls along like a wagon wheel, gathering information that is invaluable for getting to your destination of customer satisfaction.” Yes, this is an excerpt from my MLS column from 20 years ago (“How to Assess Your Marketing Effectiveness,” vol. 18, no. 3, May/June 2004). It was written under the supreme tutelage of Kathy Dempsey, editor of MLS, who deserves so very much credit and respect for waving the “true marketing” flag for so long.

The articles I wrote for her live on via citations in a textbook I co-authored, Marketing and Social Media: A Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), and so are still shared with today’s M.L.I.S. students.