1.5.1: Marketing and Branding
Other Information:
Marketing is critical to effective citizen service transformation, yet is something at which government traditionally does
not excel. Often, marketing is fundamentally misunderstood within government - as being equivalent to advertising or perhaps,
more broadly, as being equivalent to communication. And given the fact that a) citizen needs cut across organisational boundaries
in government and b) the skills for delivering an effective brand-led marketing approach to service transformation will inevitably
be in short supply, it is important that these challenges are addressed at a government-wide level. Our White Paper on "A
new Policy Framework for e-Government" sets out some of the major Policy Products which need to be developed in order to assist
government agencies in making this shift to a marketing-based approach. Citizen insight must inform all aspects of the process,
and involves a comprehensive programme of qualitative and quantitative research to understand and segment the customer base
for government services. The learnings from this need to be fed into a brand-led product management process - not as a one-off
input of initial research, but through a continuous process of iterative design and customer testing. A key output from this
will be a set of brand values for the service, which then need to drive all aspects of service delivery, and marketing communications
for the service. This is an interative process of continuous improvement, not a linear one. Continuous citizen insight research
is needed to ensure that both the service delivery experience and the marcoms activity remain aligned with the brand values,
through successive phases of release deployment. As the service is implemented, across a range of channels, best practice
management information systems can be deployed to ensure that the government now has real-time, event-level management information
about the experience of all customers - which in turn provides a powerful feedback loop into further innovation in the service
design. All of this will require the government to bring in specialist resources, because typically they will face significant
gaps in terms of the people and skills needed to manage brand-led product development and marketing cycles of this nature.
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