This chapter covers two related aspects of marketing which are increasingly important in libraries, but have not been discussed or written about often enough: marketing tointernal stakeholders, and marketing withinternal stakeholders.

The importance of internal marketing

Internal marketing really means promoting the value of the library to the wider organization in which it sits, be that local authority, business, or university. An internal stakeholder can be defined as an individual or group with a legitimate investment in the success or otherwise of the library; an external stakeholder would usually be the customer. Unlike the customer, however, someone with a contractual or economic interest in the library may both seek to influence the marketing process, and bea market themselves. In my view, the importance of marketing to internal stakeholders is massively undervalued in the library community – I see it as an essential use of our time. These people hold the pursestrings for our libraries, and it is they who can wield the axe in tough economic times; the aim should be to market ourselves so well to them that the need to promote a campaign among our users to ‘save our librar’ never arises. Because, whilst the users are absolutely essential, they don't ultimately decide whether or not to invest money into the library service (although they can certainly help persuade those that do). Rosemary Stamp, a marketing consultant who works closely with libraries, provides an expert view on communicating messages to an internal audience in the first case study of this chapter.

Another use for marketing to internal stakeholders is to be allowed to generate forwardthinking initiatives. We need to be promoting our successes to our bosses in language they understand – particularly if our bosses are not librarians – in order to secure a mandate to innovate. Andy Priestner of Cambridge University provides a case study on this subject.

Increasingly, libraries have to market themselves in collaboration with others – this presents a whole new set of challenges, including the tricky business of marketing within wider institutional branding guidelines, as dis cussed with Susan Moore of the ICAEW Library in the final case study of this chapter.