Strategies for building user loyalty in selected university libraries in Ghana

Abstract

Using business models in university libraries has proved to yield positive results. Employing an exploratory sequential mixed-method approach, this study investigated strategies for building user loyalty in selected university libraries in Ghana. One-on-one planned interviews were used to glean data from librarians from the selected institutions to assess the marketing strategies used in their respective libraries. Furthermore, data from university libraries' stakeholders were collected through focus group discussions to determine library user loyalty attributes. The results were utilised to develop the quantitative questionnaire in the second stage of the research, which was used to gather data from library users to establish the determinants of library user loyalty. In all, four study sites, twenty-eight focus group members, fifteen librarians for the one-on-one planned interviews were involved in the qualitative phase, and four hundred and thirty-four library users were considered for the quantitative strand. The researcher used the IBM SPSS version 22 to analyse the quantitative data while the qualitative data were thematically analysed using QSR NVivo qualitative analysis software. This study observed the ethical standards of research proposed by UNISA’s ethical review guidelines. The findings of this study indicate that although libraries in selected universities were using various strategies to market their products and services, none had a marketing plan to drive its marketing agenda. The study further revealed that library user loyalty was determined through a four-phased loyalty process which included cognitive, affective, conative and action loyalty. To attain action loyalty which was demonstrated through user’s commitment to using the library and its resources, librarians need to start from cognitive loyalty which was characterised by service quality to the affective loyalty which was predicted mainly by user satisfaction. Affective loyalty led to conative loyalty, expressed primarily through users’ intention to utilise the library. It was also found that some predictive attributes mediated action loyalty. It was recommended that, for libraries to build and sustain loyalty among their users, there is the need for planned marketing activities. The study also proposed a framework to guide librarians in their bid to build library user loyalty.