Marketing effectiveness measures for public sector
and not-for-profit marketing
It was gratifying to attend the AMI Government Marketing Conference, which was held in Queensland at the start of August. This is a very strong event that consistently delivers value and interest to delegates. Based on comments I had from people, this year’s event lived up to or even exceeded the standard.
As with the private sector, there is an ongoing need to monitor and measure the effectiveness of public sector marketing. There have been many worthy presentations over the past few conferences that documented the measurement of effectiveness of public sector marketing campaigns. Or did they?
The dominant topic, indeed the only topic in almost all presentations, was marketing communications. I am the first to acknowledge that advertising and promotion are a very important part of marketing, but they are not the whole mix.
Over the past year, a great deal has been written and spoken about our Marketing Metrics Project (more details) and the development of common methodologies by which a suite of metrics can be developed for any business in any sector. At present, the Metrics Toolkit is being developed. The toolkit will assist marketers in developing and applying metrics at all stages of the marketing cycle, from new product development to after-sales service.
We have acknowledged from the start, however, that the tools and methods being developed are designed to help demonstrate that growth in the value of market-based assets will lead to growth in the shareholder value of an enterprise. Critical intermediary measures here will be cash flow and profits, neither of which applies to public sector activities. As a consequence, the need to consider public sector and not-for-profit marketing metrics has been flagged as a separate concern from the start of the project.
So if we are now to start thinking about public sector metrics, it seems there are two key issues we must face. The first is the need for public sector marketers to take a more comprehensive view of what marketing means in their sector, to see if comprehensive marketing mix concepts can be used as an analytical and synthetic tool across the totality of the activities of their agencies.
The second issue is to develop conceptual analogues of the private sector marketing mix and its principal outcome-based metrics. I think this is an issue that has had very limited consideration to date.
At the Government Marketing Conference, I made a presentation on developing public sector metrics, discussing the issues in light of those being aired in the metrics project. I made some initial suggestions about developing measures, but did so more to suggest some of the questions we need to address than to try to provide answers.
I also wanted to put out the call to government marketers who might be interested in contributing to this development work from their own or their agency’s experience. I was very pleased to receive a number of responses and hope to start the process of investigation and consideration as a subsidiary activity to the main metrics project. |
