Appendix 2 - Marketing in the Public Sector

Why marketing matters in the public sector

Right now, you might be thinking to yourself a variation of one of these sentiments:

• “This has nothing to do with my work, because people must use my offering; it is compelled by law!”
• “This has nothing to do with my work; people have to use my offering because we’re the only option!”
• “This has nothing to do with me; people come to my offering because I deal with scientific research.”

Only the second part of those statements is true: your offering might be compelled by law, or you might be the only offering available, or you might deal in scientific realities. But just because those things are true doesn’t mean that this section has nothing to do with you. In fact, it makes this section even more crucial to you, for three reasons:

1. Your offering is the only one people have to complain about, meaning they will complain, and you can either have a plan to minimize the number of complaints on the front end and resolve them on the backend, or you will be yet another government offering that is reviled, made fun of, and almost universally loathed.
2. Just because people have to use your offering doesn’t mean that the relationship between you and the audience has to be unpleasant. One of the best examples of this is taxes. Just because paying your taxes is compulsory doesn’t mean it has to be unduly painful or even burdensome. Who put the IRS in their current, much-maligned position? Clever marketers, helped by the IRS’ own disregard for its audience.
3. You might run an offering that’s on the edge of the known world, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be well-served to market it. Since the public sector is the “investor of first resort” to use economist Mariana Mazzucato’s framing, marketing your work means spreading its use to a wider range of people, multiplying the potential that it’s used in the next big commercial success.

The problem with marketing in the public sector

All teams that launch or administer a product, program, service, or system end up marketing that product, program, service, or system. Good or bad, active or passive: you have chosen to market if you offer something to the world.

So the problem most public sector teams face isn’t whether or not to market (that’s happening anyway); it’s that their marketing is bad and passive.

Bad marketing in the public sector takes two forms:

1. Lack of Specificity: When the offering is made without the identification and analysis of a highly specific target group, then you haven’t clearly identified your target audience.
2. Bad Hostessing: When the language and imagery for the offering doesn’t reflect the target audience’s language or preferred imagery, then the target audience doesn’t even realize it’s for them.

Problem (2) follows problem (1); you can’t possibly market to an audience effectively if you haven’t identified that audience specifically and intentionally.

Passive marketing also stems from at least two problems:

1. Again, when the offering is made without the identification and analysis of a highly specific target group. When the team decides that, since there’s no marketing budget, they will not try at marketing their product, program, service, or system.

2. Passive marketing is endemic to public sector work. Most public sector teams “post and pray” or simply launch or administer their offering through customary channels, even if they know those channels aren’t particularly good ones for their target audience. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way, and you don’t need a lot of time or budget to make the marketing of your product, program, service, or system good and active instead of bad and passive. What you need is the will to think critically about your target audience and how to market to them.