Making the twain meet: applying marketing principles to local government activities

Abstract

This paper presents a local government marketing model developed from marketing principles. Although local government has met the general needs of corporatisation by downsizing, changing accounting practices, and adopting new human resource planning procedures, it has had difficulties in adopting marketing principles. Unlike private sector organisations, local government management has to comply to National Competition Policy guidelines, as well as delivering services in an environment where the public is increasingly seeking accountability and perceived value from their representatives. In addressing this need, the model developed in this research recognises the importance of the customer – citizen continuum as a means of coping with the psychic distance between the electors and the elected in adapting marketing principles to local government activities. Local government marketing is seen here as being different from that which might apply to other levels of government (state and federal) because of the relative closeness between local government operations and the public. Therefore accountability and service to the community and other stakeholders are seen as paramount and any strategic marketing approach must cater for constituents’ needs. Most marketing literature recognises this need but fails to provide a holistic approach, as is required in this instance, instead tending to use piecemeal applications. This paper therefore, presents a local government marketing application model, which encompasses the issues raised above. This model was developed from the literature and then subjectively tested using a case study approach.