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Australian and international governments are increasingly adopting social marketing as a social change management tool to deal with complex social problems. Government decision makers typically need to balance the use of business models and management theories whilst maintaining the integrity of government policy. In taking this approach, decision makers experience management tensions between a social mission to equitably deliver social services and the accountability and affordability of providing quality social and health services to citizens. This is a significant challenge as the nature of the ‘social product’ in government is often more service-oriented than goods-based. In this paper the authors examine value creation in government social marketing services. The contribution of this paper is a value creation process model, which considers the nature of governments to create social good. This is particularly important for governments where consumers still expect value and quality in the service delivered, despite that offering being ‘free’.

Social marketing has a well-established history as a social change management tool (Andreasean, 2002). As social change in the interests of the community is a key mandate for governments, it is not surprising that governments are adopting social marketing as a means to manage individual and societal change. Yet achieving social change in a climate of accountability and effectiveness is a challenge that many governments face. Since the early 1990s, public sector policy-makers have become more sensitive to the needs of their consumers (Behm et al., 2000) and many government organisations around the world have adopted business models to assist them with affecting social change in this climate. A recent example is the UK government’s (2006) review of health services which recommended that social marketing be used as key intervention strategy (NSM, 2008). Given the prominence and use of social marketing in health services (e.g., health screening, quit smoking services, etc.) (Hastings, 2007), the scope of this paper is limited to government services. However, this paper does not revisit the extensive research published on government marketing, nor the published literatures in social marketing focused on individual behaviour change.

This paper makes theoretical contributions to three sub-disciplinary areas of marketing: government marketing, services marketing and social marketing. First, we have proposed a process model of value creation that departs from the traditional economic view of customer value by adopting an experiential view that includes functional, social, emotional and altruistic value. Second, we adapt Smith and Colgate’s (2007) sources of value (i.e., information, service, interaction and environment) to a typically ‘free’ service context and propose in the process model that the four types of value will be influenced by some or all of these sources at each of the three stages of consumption.