Marketing Culture of Award-Winning Secondary School Librarians: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences developing, understanding, and implementing marketing culture for award-winning secondary school librarians in the United States. The conceptual framework guiding this study was marketing culture, which explores the context of marketing attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors of organizations, purportedly leading to organizational success. This study used a phenomenological approach with secondary school librarians who had won an award for their work as a school librarian. Data collection consisted of individual semi-structured interviews, artifact analysis, and reflective journal prompts. Data analysis consisted of a hermeneutic epoché-reduction followed by a manual analysis of the interview transcripts and journal prompt responses using van Manen’s holistic, selective, and detailed approach. As insight cultivators, the physical artifacts were analyzed using a directed qualitative content analysis approach in which initial codes based on marketing concepts gleaned from the literature are assigned to passages that support, refute, or provide additional insights into the phenomenon. The analysis of the data resulted in five themes: Marketing Knowledge, Marketing Dispositions, Implementation Factors, Tools and Tactics, and Marketing Strategies. These themes served to answer the research questions. The interpretation of findings centered on the participants’ marketing journey, the changing nature of school libraries, the participants’ personal traits, and contextual implementation. Policy, practice, empirical, and theoretical implications were addressed, as were study limitations and delimitations. Recommendations for future research are provided.