 The conference theme is what values should guide our research libraries so you might think well this is a little bit tangential Gavin, branding that's about the communication of value to our users. Hopefully as a result of the next 20 minutes I will convince you it's slightly more than that and maybe even if you already think it is more than that convince you that you're not alone because I don't believe we're talking about branding within research libraries within higher education institutions in the UK enough. So I did get carried away with the tagline for REL UK 2018 Metamorphosis, the changing role of the modern research library and this is how I got carried away. Now I do have to start with an apology to any lepidoptrists in the room. I said in my abstract that I may have said in my abstract or alluded to the fact that the butterflies are beautiful and moths are not or the butterflies are good and moths are bad. I don't believe that. It is a metaphor. However it is a useful metaphor I think for explaining what I'm on about when it comes to brand. So my jumping off point is a study that was done last year by colleagues at the University of Sheffield and others which was a very good study and contained academically five mantras to be considered and also there was some other things in there as well. The first mantra that libraries were asked to consider is that the library has a strong brand. It is something that many of the people of the paper talks to and interviews mentioned over and over again but this brand can be both a strength and a weakness and should not be seen as an unqualified good thing. It can sometimes get in the way of communicating the message of what the library is currently is as well as what the library might become. Now this is no surprise to librarians, us in the sector, us in research libraries and higher education. We have been diversifying our services for so many years now ten years and do so many different things that I can't believe there's one person in this room who hasn't heard really you do that. In terms of some surprise and indeed there's an OCLC report as well that says this. From 2005 to 2014 the perception of the book brand, book brand, libraries as books or places for books has cemented, which is a curious use of the term but has cemented 69% of online users indicated their first thought of a library was books in 2005. 75% in both 2010 and 2014. This despite the fact that libraries are doing more and more things that aren't really books. So what's going on here? Why is the notion of a brand solidifying, I'm going to use the word solidifying, cementing is weird for me. Despite this diversification of services and that's because brand is not just about what you're doing. It's how you fit into, and I'm going to use a phrase here that I might apologise for later, the conceptual landscape of your user. It's where they place you and where they place you is not entirely up to what you do. It's also up to do with the context within which you operate. What other people around you are doing. To use my metaphor it will come in useful. The cabbage white butterfly in a display of moths. Is the beautiful one. But if the leper doctorist in question starts adding in rather more exotic butterflies to that collection, it will quickly lose the tag of the beautiful one. The cabbage white butterfly is a lovely butterfly, but it is quite plain and very common. Okay, so we as research libraries do need to think I think this way about brand. Why? Before I go further I just want to say the notion that libraries are strong brand has been around for quite some time. To the extent that some libraries have decided to move away from it because it's just too strong to do anything with. Now I'm using these slides as a way of referencing these so that people can go back and look at them later. And there are some lovely examples. I'm not going to talk about these because this avoids the problem. Even if you move away from the word library and to anything called ideas stores or commons, we have commons in Shaffield, learning centres, you still have the issue of branding those entities, telling people what they are, communicating the value. So just moving away from the word library is not sufficient. I will give an honourable mention here to University of Leicester. If you did a quick search on your discovery system, this one should come up. Interestingly, it is a very sparse UK landscape for any case studies about universities talking about branding at university libraries anyway. Except if you have an East Asian studies librarian on hand, please do check out the number of Korean and Chinese language articles on branding in libraries. It will be very instructive and if you can convince them to translate them for you even better, but there are quite a few more than there are in this country. So I'm with Serrat 2017. In respect of configuration, libraries must in addition be doing more about branding. Why aren't we seeing lots of case studies? Why aren't we seeing lots of discussions about branding? Why when I bring it up do I feel a little bit awkward? I don't think it's to do with the etymology of the words. I don't think it's the fact that library means book and brand means burn and that you shouldn't put the two together. Any librarian with a keen sense of etymology in history knows that since that's by the way the burning of... That's the great fire of Alexandria. Ever since then we shouldn't be doing those two things together. But it's not only, it's our context that makes branding important. So let's move away from brand and into context. What is our context? Our context is higher education institutions. This is again from tipping point. How concerned shall we be about the library band? Well depends on what you think the context in which we operate will be in the future. The paper I alluded to earlier mentions that we still have a vision of libraries going on being fairly similar to what they are now. But that higher education context is very interesting. This was Sir Professor, I can never remember which way round. Tim Wilson in 2012 in his review of business university collaborations. Universities operate in specific domains meeting the needs of a range of businesses and no one university can operate in all domains. This was accepted at the time and the domains he's talking about here are education of highly skilled graduates, applied research in advanced technologies, bespoke collaborative degree programs, science park developments, enterprise education, apprenticeships. Rhetorical question, we have representatives from a vast number of research libraries and institutions in this room now. Is any of our institutions not doing all of those things? We probably are. So despite the fact that eminent people say that we should not be doing as universities all things or cannot be doing all things, we are. Does that suggest that perhaps higher education institutions have been slow to adapt to change? Here's a little example I want to give you of a certain context which is very relevant to research libraries that support universities. So here is the domain. It's the depth and breadth of a higher education institution. Very simply across the bottom is the breadth going from arts to no particular order there just generally trying to cover all of the disciplines and going from undergraduate taught all the way through to research. Now we can map a university against this space. Just by looking at the coverage in depth and breadth of this discipline. So let's map what I suggest is probably with only one or two very small exceptions our institutions, all of our institutions against this domain. And that's what we have been for quite some time. Now in 2012 going back this was a critical year 2012. The government reduced the student numbers criteria for university title from 4,000 to 1,000. And that was very specifically to encourage new entrants into and I'm going to use the word for the first time, the marketplace. And in 2012 you can see there's a big surge and since then it's kind of tailed off. We can discuss the reasons why over coffee but and this paper was highlighted to me by my library director. I strongly recommend you read it. It is a very good paper indeed. In environments such as this marketplace companies that attempt to be all things to all people begin to struggle when upstart competitors start picking off profitable niches in a usual marketplace development of a marketplace. So one might expect to see this sort of thing. You might expect to see providers who specialize in social science all the way from undergraduate taught through to research. You might expect to see some who just teach engineering and medicine or some who just specialize in research. Or indeed that's if you like a definition by discipline. You could go further and say somebody's niche could be another thing entirely. It might be their local area or they target market. So they might cover many different things. But we haven't seen this kind of disruption to any great extent in UK higher education. Now before you say thank goodness Gavin we don't want to see that and a lot of people do say that to me. Prime Minister Theresa May very kindly gave a talk the other day. This was after I suggested I gave this give this talk and she said these words. The competitive market between universities which the system of variable tuition fees envisaged has simply not emerged. And I don't think she approved. Now this was no speech launching a review of post 18 education. We really need to watch that. We need to really need to pay attention to that because I do suspect more changes coming. Changes happened. They've moved the levers they could move. That's terrible. Policy makers have made policy changes in a hope that they would increase market competition. And now you're seeing actually what they're looking at trying to change are not the levers they can change in terms of policy but the outputs. Things like pricing. Pricing is supposed to be a good that comes from the machine. So let's zoom back in having zoomed out to higher education and the context and zoom back into research libraries. We are here. We are here. Most of us work with universities to support our universities and if our universities are having a tough time adapting to a new marketplace. We will be having a tough time trying to figure out how we can best support them. We also operate in many different areas. We have a fragmented user base. We have many different relationships because of our diversified services. Vary media of engagement we've heard about those today. Varying expectations of what those services are and sometimes different levels of service. And we all know that our context is just as challenging externally external to the universities we work for with the publishing environment. Again we've heard about that. So given we know our context and we know that we're working within universities that themselves are struggling to move back on to the notion of branding. And I love the candles that smell of libraries by the way. I'm going to be using that. These are some lovely quotes. Branding is more than the look and feel of the service. It is making the user or library patron feel something. The brand needs to permeate every aspect of the user interaction experience from the moment they walk through the doors to the websites offered to the face-to-face experiences that occur. And that is actually quite hard to do across all of these services. How do we unify the feel of the library across all of these different services? How do we get the same message across? And it's worse than that because it's not just users that we need to pay attention to. It's stakeholders. By stakeholders I mean influencers and decision makers. Here's what I mean by this. Let's just go to this. Typically if you think of promotion marketing branding, when I discuss branding people say that's marketing. Sometimes in tones of I don't want anything to do with it. But it's not part of marketing. It's bigger. It is to marketing what I think marketing is to promotion. A promotion of a service or a new collection is one specific thing that you are promoting to perhaps some users. Marketing is a bigger view about all of the activities that you do and promotions will be one part of that but so will many other things. Marketing, I love the notion of thinking of libraries as a verb. If you think of marketing as a verb, marketing is going to market. Marketing and taking what we have to market. But given that marketing is a bigger overarching thing and promotions are within that, branding is even bigger than that. Because branding isn't just about taking your service to market. Branding, as we heard from Roly earlier, we were discussing this before the start. Branding is also about talking to your funders, the people who make decisions about you. It is how they feel about the service you provide to another person. So branding is about stakeholders, marketing is about users. And we all know what the use of brand is, it manages the expectations of users. It can motivate your workforce if you get the brand right. Developing relationships, it works for you when you are not there. It can drive your communications, generate goodwill. We know all these things. It's not just companions and promotions, not just marketing messages, not just logos. Although please do note our logo up there, that's the University of Sheffield logo. It's not a separate logo, it's an identity. That's very important. And it's not just motos, it's how people perceive you and conceive of you. It's your value, your purpose and not your function. But all of this has to fit within the branding of our institutions. So our values of our libraries must fit with the values of our institution. The branding of our library must fit with the branding of our institution. And how can we do that if our institutions haven't actually got a handle on branding? And don't expect all of them to have a handle on branding because they haven't had to work in that environment where they've needed to. Okay? Some will have it and can be quite obsessive and protective about simple things like logos. Where's the University of Sheffield logo he notices on his slide? That could be problematic for me. But there are other universities who don't care at all. And haven't even developed any policies about this. How do you fit a library brand into a university brand if you're not entirely sure what the university brand is? And our brands and our values must support and align those of our institutions. In that report that came out last year, there were Pinfield et al spelled out three different sorts of alignment with institutions. They were service provider, partner and leader. Now, we do service provision, we're very good at it. And we're pretty good partners. We work very well together. Do we do enough leading? Some say we do, some say we don't. But my point is in order to be a leader you have to be seen as relevant. And in order for that to happen, you have to have a strong brand within your institution. Because yours is not the only voice. And the important point here is we cannot wait for our higher education institutions to get their branding act together. To understand where they fit into what is a rapidly changing and very turbulent marketplace for higher education. We need to lead them. And we need to work on our own brand and how that fits within the context in order for us to affect the change that they need. Okay? And here's the important part. Because it is the context that determines your brand, if you are not actively discussing your brand in your library, if you're not actively working on it and actively promoting it, if you're not controlling it, somebody else's, something else's, the environment is. And that's not good. Because decisions will have to be made in universities up and down this country over the next 5 to 10 years, if not sooner. Okay, lighten it a bit. I'm getting a bit serious there. So I will for the lepidoctrus come back to our lovely butterfly and our moth. And just point out that, as all lepidoctrus would require me to do, these are endangered species. There are 24 UK butterflies on the endangered species list. There are 150 moths on the endangered species list. Now I'm not making a point about the relative scarcity of these two insects or indeed the value or worth or merit of them, whether some should or shouldn't go. The point I want to make is this information comes from the butterfly conservation organisation. It's not the moth conservation organisation. Thank you.