Public Service Organizations Lack Marketing Strategies In Promoting Gov�t Programs And Services

Chairperson of the Public Service Commission, Ghana, Mrs. Bridget Katsriku has expressed the need for the public service organizations in the country to engage in marketing as means to help the government to compete for external aid through foreign direct investment and grants from the developed countries. According to her, marketing has often been regarded as the exclusive preserve of the private sector and non-state organizations for serious business, but added that some aspect of the public sector implicitly involves the concept of marketing as there is customer service charters, call centers and research on customer satisfaction to improve on service delivery. But speaking at the 25th CIMG Presidential Dinner Dance and the 15th Closing Ceremony of the Ghana School of Marketing, the Chairperson of the Public Service Commission said that though the government through Ambassadors and Trade Commercial Attach�s are marketing Ghana businesses and investment opportunities, the public service is not doing well as far as marketing is concerned. She admitted that the public outbursts sometimes against poor service delivery by public service organizations may be partly due to the inability of public service organizations to effectively market themselves; adding they have poor marketing strategies. She however urged that it is time for the public service organizations to fully embrace and incorporate marketing principles that helps them to recognize their potentials for the successful adoption and implementation of strategic service delivery plans. She insisted that in the era of citizens� participation in governance, the MDAs and MMDAs must see the crucial role played by marketing in guiding citizens to decide where, when and how they make their daily choices of public services they consume. She feared that, public service organizations are destined to become ineffective if they do not flow with the current wind of change which is blowing all over the world; adding marketing is a profession whose potential is not sufficiently recognized in the public service, leading to seemingly lack of reliance on marketing as a strategy for providing the good quality services needed by the Ghanaian public. She again confessed that marketing plays an important role in promoting the national development agenda as public servants have the duty of creating loyalty by gaining the trust of the citizens and ensuring value for the services that they provide. �We should adopt marketing strategies which would help us as public service organizations to receive feedback from our clients and customers as to whether our services are relevant to their needs. We may not be using strategic marketing tools for enhanced productivity and satisfaction of our beneficiaries, perhaps because of lack of the knowledge and skills,� she added. �The public services generally can be said to have poor marketing strategies or sometimes have no marketing strategies, period; in contemporary public service worldwide, governments are using marketing principles to achieve more effective results, especially in the area of behavior change," she admitted.