Six key marketing mistakes the government makes

1. Not listening to their customers.  How often are we asked for our opinions and feedback on how they can better serve us?  Sure we get plenty of opinion polls so our politicians know what to say to get elected, but what about our ideas on how to fix the many broken processes and agencies?  We all have plenty of stories about the terrible customer service at a local government agency that everyone knows how to fix.  We’re just never asked.  Or the local high school teacher or coach who everyone knows is destroying our children year after year but we are never asked to evaluate them.  Successful businesses have many lines of communication with their customers that have been enhanced with internet tools.  People stop supporting businesses that don’t listen to them and they die.  We don’t have a choice with dysfunctional governments except to move.
2.  Raising prices as the primary means of balancing the budget.  For businesses that have stopped being profitable and have trouble making their budgets, raising prices would likely hurt sales volume and could put them out of business.  So what do they do?  They become more operationally efficient, prune their product line, and find creative ways to generate more sales.  So why do our governments continually raise taxes and fees as their first reaction to fewer customers (a declining taxpayer base) and higher costs?  How many times have you seen them discontinue or streamline a social program, or re-engineer a process?  Instead, they raise their prices which we or obligated to pay, or move away.
3. Not articulating and executing on a clear, focused vision and mission.   To be successful in business, you need a unique selling proposition.  You have to clearly define what you can do better than your competitors within some limited parameters.  You absolutely cannot be all things to all people.  You cannot possibly do everything yourself.  Yet that’s exactly what our government tries to do, even when there are much better options and more appropriate organizations to do much of what they try to do.  We never expect one company to serve all of our needs, so why should we expect our government to do everything for us.  If anything, we find that intrusive and try to move away from companies and governments that try to control us too much.
4. Being unwilling to partner and outsource the appropriate functions.  Most successful businesses realize they do not have the expertise to do all of the critical functions they need to compete so their hire outside ad agencies, law firms, logistics providers, consultants and outsource many manufacturing and operational functions.  This gives them a higher level of competency at a lower cost than doing it themselves.  Our governments, however, seek to do everything, even when a privately-run solution would provide a better result and a lower cost.  Not only do they do too many things, they try to do them all themselves, setting up inefficient bureaucracies and processes that waste our money (that could have bought the same service much more efficiency and efficiently).  They waste taxpayer dollars in what they do and how they do it.
5. Not involving and developing employees.  Everyone, except the government, seems to know that an organization is doomed for failure if it doesn’t involve and motivate its employees.  To be successful, you need employees who take ownership in meeting goals, help solve problem (not cause them,) and go the extra mile to serve customers.  Why do you think compensation plans with incentives are so important in the private sector?  Public employees, however, get paid per the union contract and can seemingly never be fired.  You should have seen the outrage when the local teachers were going to be evaluated on all student scores, even though many students do not attend classes.  In most organizations, we are used to having goals that involve the actions of others.  Heck, it fosters innovation, cooperation, teamwork, collaboration and creates a customer focus.  If the teachers would have spent more time on solving why students aren’t coming to school and on partnering with parents to solve the problem, and less time on complaining about how unfair the evaluations were, our students would benefit and want to come to school.  So instead of involving teacher and incentivizing them to solve our number one problem of poor attendance, the school system caved in.  If you aren’t getting the education you desire, I guess you’ll have to move to a system that doesn’t value the teacher’s union more than your children.
6. Treating your best customer worse than your bad ones.  This a classic problem that most good marketing organizations have figured out:  segment your customer base and provide a higher level of service and value for your best customers and fire your bad ones.  Best Buy stopped marketing aggressively to customers who they lost money on with much success.  The government, however, continues to advertise food stamps and treat taxpayers worse than those on the public dole.  They expand and advertise welfare programs and expect the diminishing base of taxpayers to support these services for which we receive no benefit.  So with citizens on public assistance now in the majority driving the taxpayers out of town, who’s going to be left to foot the bill? 

While we can’t run our governments exactly like businesses, we can certainly employ some basic marketing principles such as being customer and employee focused and be much more effective and efficient.