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Keywords
Marketing strategy, Public libraries, Focus groups, Australia
Abstract
The measurement of both marketing culture and behaviour provides the opportunity to gain more insight into the overall market focus of organisations. This article seeks to determine the market orientation and marketing culture of all staff within organisations, to ascertain to what extent other members of an organisation support or create barriers to the successful implementation of the marketing concept. This paper will provide a brief overview of the existing literature in the field of market orientation and marketing culture. After detailing the research design and methodology, a summary developed from 11 focus group sessions - consisting of all staff in one public library service in Victoria, Australia - is presented. The findings indicate that while all areas within this organisation are committed to marketing, there are various interpretations of marketing and how it should be implemented. In addition, the research finds a number of factors that could be instrumental in the successful implementation of the marketing concept in public libraries.
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Introduction
It is commonly accepted that the implementation of the marketing concept (Drucker, 1954; Kotler, 1977) is related to the market orientation of the organisation (Heiens, 2000). The notion of investigating the relationship between the marketing culture of service organisations and market orientation in traditionally product-focussed organisations, such as libraries and museums, has not appeared in the international literature in any expansive form to date, although there have been some allusions to the desirability of exploring the relationship between marketing and management mindsets and organisational performance and productivity. Furthermore, the concept of intra-organisational marketing culture and orientation has only recently been empirically examined in the international marketing literature (Kennedy et al., 2002; Leisen et al., 2002), despite discussion about the desirability of such an approach by service researchers and practitioners over the past 20 years (Grönroos, 1983, p. 90; Gummesson, 1991; Heskett et al., 1997; Heiens, 2000). Kennedy et al. (2002), for example, developed an instrument for measuring customer mindsets of employees, arguing that the most important element of market orientation is an internal and external focus...