The joys of branding

I love consistency. Maybe this is what drew me to the librarianship world in the first place, or maybe it just represents my slightly anal personality! And this love of consistency came to the forefront when I took part in the marketing and publicity working group in the lead up to the opening of Newcastle City Library in June 2009. In this group we looked at how we were going to re-brand the new City Library and also transfer that branding over to the branch libraries so that no-matter which branch library you walked in to you knew it was part of Newcastle Libraries and you roughly knew the layout of the stock due to subconscious recognition. The outcome was the production of themed, coloured shelf headers which have now been rolled out to most of the branch libraries, new library cards with all the colours represented in a bar code format, poster templates with branded logos so staff can drop local library event publicity in while maintaining a service wide image, a Newcastle Libraries blog with the branding all over it (lovingly developed by Jennifer Clark our e-officer) and uniforms with the library logo on so staff can be easily identified by customers.....And the results are 2 years on?

In my opinion there is definitely a more joined up feel to the library service and it feels more professional as a result. When you walk in to level 1 of the City Library you see a bright orange wall and orange strips on the self headers to represent the fiction. As you walk up the stairs or take a lift to another floor you are offered a menu of floor and subject options which not only have the text on, but are all colour coded. So it soon sinks in to your subconscious that green = fiction, yellow = children, pink=music and movies, teal = heritage and so on. And I love all of this and I think it's essential that we in the library profession take on these marketing tips that the retail sector uses to great effect so well. There is no doubt is there that an M & S is an M &S wherever you walk into one in the country? The green and black colours, along with floor tiles etc spell out the M & S brand. And so it should be with libraries........but what about librarians? Thing 3 of CPD23 has certainly made me ponder upon this tonight and made me think about whether I should be as concerned with my own professional brand as I am about the library branding.

I have to be honest, I've not given my online brand any thought before now. In the past I've just made sure that if anyone types my name into google, they don't get anything up regarding me and that the focus is the actress Anne Archer and not on me! Protecting my privacy rather than promoting my professional self has been my priority. But maybe I should be proactive in presenting my professional self to future employers? For starters I could start to actively use my dormant twitter account (I have one for training purposes, but don't use it for anything but that) and I could also set up a LinkedIn profile. I could put a picture of myself on this blog and write a bit of a summary about myself. I could put Anne Archer somewhere in the title of this blog so it gets picked up by searches....the list is endless. However, when reading around this subject on the CPD23 blog under Thing 3, it made me kind of nervous as well. There is so much to consider and although I'm all for personality, I do like there to be a line between personal and professional. However, I was reassured to read on Andromeda Yelton's blog there was reference to professional branding being about cultivating networking and relationships. This to me is so important and I feel that in a digital age, face to face contact shouldn't be neglected. So I breathed a sigh of relief at this and although I will definitely consider my online presence more, I will continue to work on those face to face contacts......