Marketing in the public sector: Inappropriate or merely difficult?

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Abstract
Economic and political imperatives of the 1980s have seen governments turn to private sector managerial techniques, practices and orientations to enable them to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Among these is marketing which has received increasing attention as governments have looked to privatize, corporatize or simply introduce some level of “user‐pays” principle into their operations. Despite the ambitious claims of the marketing discipline, the transposition of marketing to the public sector has not proved to be without problems. This paper reviews why such a transposition might be difficult. It also reviews the claim of marketing to be an appropriate discipline at all for widespread application in the public sector. The paper concludes that marketers should be cautious as to the extent to which their discipline can be transposed or modified to assist governments identity, plan, deliver and evaluate services more efficiently and effectively.