Educating Non-marketers about Marketing: Tell, Don’t Sell

Jill Stover, who has a great blog on Library Marketing: Thinking Outside the Book, wrote an interesting post about convincing librarians that marketing is not fluff. She suggests a marketing-as-teaching metaphor to help her colleagues better understand marketing’s merits: “What we’re actually doing as we market library services is teaching our patrons about what we have to offer, why it’s valuable, and how to take advantage of it.”

Great idea, Jill. As marketers we need to do a better job of de-mystifying marketing by educating our non-marketing colleagues on what marketing really does and how it helps our organizations reach out to really serve customers. This means being open and inclusive in our marketing efforts. (For more ideas here, check out one of my earlier posts on Marketing Marketing.)