برندسازی و مشتری مداری شرکت های بخش دولتی

The objectives of branding and marketing in the public sector can differ in nature from those in the private sector, to include an improved responsiveness to public needs, rather than an increase in customer numbers. In addition, the customer orientation (a disposition that will influence brand perception) of public services is often questioned. Drawing from prior work in the private sector on the relationships expected between employee and organization customer orientation (hereafter referred to as CO), corporate brand personality, and both employee and customer satisfaction, the authors propose a number of models. These models are tested using structural equation modeling on data from a study of the employees (n = 302) and customers (n = 200) of a public hospital. Corporate brand personality mediates the positive links between employee customer orientation (hereafter referred to as ECO) and satisfaction; ECO influences brand personality, which in turn influences satisfaction. However, while both the needs and enjoyment dimensions of ECO improve customer satisfaction, the former has an unexpected, negative effect on employees. Organization customer orientation (hereafter referred to as OCO) influences customer, but not employee, satisfaction. The paper discusses the implications for managing and researching corporate branding in the public sector.

Branding and corporate branding are terms more often associated with the private rather than the public sector of an economy. Significant exceptions exist, such as the branding of countries, regions, and cities (Jaffe and Nebenzahl, 2001), but the application of marketing concepts to public sector organizations is still a relatively new topic for researchers (Kotler and Lee, 2007a and Kotler and Lee, 2007b). The marketing of many public services may inevitably be different from that in the private sector (Laing, 2003) as the defining characteristics of public services include the dominance of political rather than economic objectives, and the primacy of the citizen rather than the consumer (Lovelock and Weinberg, 1990). In particular, governments may require organizations in public ownership to become more responsive to the customer and his/her needs, in other words, to become more customer-oriented, rather than to increase the number of customers. Yet other aspects of public sector branding can be similar to those in the private sector. A key to sustaining and expanding many public services is to build customer satisfaction and confidence (Corbin et al., 2001). Hospitals, universities, and government and regulatory agencies seek to express their identities through marketing and branding (Wæraas, 2008); and services such as a public hospital may be concerned to build both awareness and loyalty (Hood and Henderson, 2005). When a choice exists, for example between hospitals, a common approach to making the public sector more responsive is for governments to insist improved choices for patients. The more positive the associations that are made by external stakeholders, the more likely they are to select one hospital over another (Shahian et al., 2000). The more confidence patients have in a hospital and its services, the more likely is their recovery (Health Service Executive Transformation Programme, 2007–2010). Stakeholder views of a hospital's clinical ability will depend, in part, upon its brand among its community (Tokunaga et al., 2000). Kim et al. (2008) suggest that to have a successful healthcare organization, marketing efforts must focus on building a high level of trust. So, while differences exist, many aspects of branding are common to both public and private sectors, in addition to the need to consider employees as well as customers. A number of reasons exist for considering the employee perspective in understanding corporate branding in any service context, including that of the public sector. Employees can act as brand ambassadors (De Chernatony, 2006 and Wallace and De Chernatony, 2008) and their interaction with external stakeholders will in turn shape the external view of the brand (Bettencourt et al., 2001). Specifically, the view that customer-facing employees have of their organization influences the impression that customers form of the organization (de Chernatony, 1999). A number of models of corporate branding see the customer and employee perspectives as interlinked or even interdependent (Hatch and Schultz, 1997, Fombrun, 1996 and Davies and Miles, 1998). Such alignment emphasizes matching external brand image to internal views and values (De Chernatony Leslie, 1999 and Hatch and Schultz, 2001). If customer-facing employees share a positive view of the organization with customers, then a positive interaction between them is more likely to occur (Chun and Davies, 2006). Further, the associations made with a corporate brand result from an accumulation of all the communication and experiences about and with that brand (Fombrun, 1996). Central to this is the customer's experience with employees, and the CO of front-line service employees will influence the perceptions external stakeholders have of their experiences (Brown et al., 2002). High levels of CO enhance service user views of the organization's brand through positive interactions with the brand's employees, and will result in greater overall satisfaction among both internal and external stakeholders (Rust et al., 1996 p. 391). However a low CO is often an issue in the public sector, resulting in improvement initiatives in many countries (Chen et al., 2004). Budgets for the overt promotion of positive associations with the corporate name may be limited in the public sector and any attempt to improve perception though advertising is liable to criticism as being a waste of public money. Brand building must therefore rely on other methods, including managing the customer experience. This same experience may also damage the corporate brand when employees fail to deliver on the brand promise (de Chernatony, 2006). In addition, because employees are important stakeholders in their own right, they need to be attracted and also retained. For example, healthcare, the empirical focus for this paper, is the fastest growing service in both developed and developing countries worldwide (Dey et al., 2006). The health sector in Ireland, the location for the study, is the largest employer in the State, and the Health Services Executive (HSE) employs more than 120,000 staff in a population of just over 4 million. Their budget of almost €15 billion is the largest of any public sector organization in the country. Hospitals compete with each other and with employers in the private sector for employees. In the public sector generally, wages tend to be lower than in the private sector, partly because employees can derive a motivational utility from working in the public sector (Delfgauw and Dur, 2008). Put another way, employee satisfaction and retention can depend upon how favorable the associations are that they make with their employer. In summary, while branding has become more prominent in the public sector, its role with stakeholders is under explored. CO in the public sector is a particular concern. As CO shapes experience with the brand for both customers and employees, and experience in turn shapes the associations both make with the brand; one expects a relationship between CO and brand associations. To understand better both issues and how they interact, the aims of this study are (1) to explore the role of the corporate brand and customer orientation on stakeholder satisfaction in a public sector context, and (2) to investigate the impact of both organizational and employee CO on employee and customer stakeholder satisfaction in that same context. The paper begins with a review of prior theory and research pertaining to customer orientation, stakeholder satisfaction, and corporate brand personality leading to the development of three hypotheses. Subsequently, the authors present the methods and results from field studies with employees, patients, and their visitors at a public hospital in the South of Ireland. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for research and practice in public sector brand management

Public sector managers often overlook or misunderstand the benefits of marketing (Kotler and Lee, 2007a and Kotler and Lee, 2007b) or view them as inappropriate (Laing, 2003). One concept central to marketing is customer orientation (CO). The relevance of CO to a publicly-owned organization goes beyond the idea of assuring tax payers that the public is getting value for money, and specifically that organizations such as hospitals and schools are responsive to user views and needs. Links demonstrated between CO and positive organizational outcomes in the commercial sector (Saxe and Weitz, 1982) are consistent when assessed either at the individual level (Brown et al., 2002) or at the corporate level (Narver and Slater, 1990). Such outcomes include improved satisfaction for both customers and employees from a greater CO (Rust et al., 1996). The results from this study in the public sector do not align fully with the expectations from prior studies in the private sector. One explanation could be that the organization studied here is failing by not embracing CO. However, the hospital is a designated center of excellence in many clinical areas. This is far from being an institution in crisis as might be inferred, as the hospital is, from the interviews with employees and other data sources, well regarded in Ireland. Of immediate concern to the hospital management is the lack of a significant relationship between OCO and either ECO or staff satisfaction. The customer model demonstrates such links, but may be due to an assumption by customers that senior management, with whom they have little contact, and their policies, are responsible for the ECO that they can observe. If Model 8 (Table 4) positions OCO as mediating the influence of ECO on satisfaction, the fit is very similar lending some support to that possibility. The scores from employees to individual questions measuring OCO are often low. The mean for the items such as ‘have organized our hospital to the needs of our patients’ and ‘pay close attention to our patients after treatment’ are below the midpoint of the rating scale; implying general disagreement with these statements. But this does not explain the lack of a correlation in such a large sample between OCO and ECO (Table 2). More likely, a disconnection exists between OCO and ECO, where employees do not associate hospital policy on CO with their own attitudes to CO. This could explain the equally unexpected results showing differences in the effect of the two aspects of ECO. Employees, rather than managers, are defining what CO represents. Highly qualified professionals, doctors, nurses, teachers, lecturers, police, and lawyers often dominate public sector organizations. However managers who may or may not share the same background as the professionals they manage, very often manage such staff. The latter may well see their role as imparting their knowledge and skills to the public rather than helping customers to address their own needs. This raises the possibility of rethinking the management of customer orientation in the context of public sector organizations. Further work needs to explore the possibility that customer orientation, as defined in the commercial sector, is either not appropriate to the public sector, or that examples are necessary where the transfer of such ideas has worked. Corporate brand imagery develops through actual experiences with the brand (Fombrun, 1996), and CO can be expected to influence the associations stakeholders make with an organization. Links between these and CO have not been overtly tested in either the public or private sectors, but the two effects hypothesized from available theory and prior studies, that is, ECO influences brand associations to the point where the links between ECO and satisfaction are mediated by such associations, find support in the study data. Not surprisingly, the stronger that same brand imagery, the more satisfaction reported by the same respondents, a finding very much in line with previous work in the commercial sector with both employees and customers of the same organization (Chun and Davies, 2006). The significant links from both aspects of ECO to satisfaction, but mediated by Agreeableness and Competence, imply that the relationship between ECO and satisfaction is indirect and via brand imagery. An examination of this finding in the private sector, and in further studies in different contexts within the public sector, would offer fruitful avenues for further research. The findings here emphasize the potential to promote greater CO, and by doing so, build positive associations with the corporate brand. In the commercial sector, training to promote CO is an option but one that may not be favored here as many training programs rely upon a didactic approach. Peccei and Rosenthal (2000) find that, even in the private sector, responses to CO programs are not homogeneous. In other words, assuming as many do, that if the investment in such training is large enough a positive effect will result, ignores the reality that some will pay lip service to CO initiatives and others will reject the idea both attitudinally and behaviorally. Resistance from front-line service employees to the articulation of marketing concepts has resulted in a widespread failure to translate organizational commitment into reality in the public sector (Laing and McKee, 2001). A cognitively-based approach to CO development is more likely to succeed in many public sector organizations, including those in healthcare and education, where employees might need evidence that being more customer-oriented makes their efforts within their professional role more effective. Finally, any assumption that relationships demonstrated in the commercial sector hold in the public sector require further investigation. All three developed hypotheses are from prior work in the private sector, but the findings support only one of these hypotheses for the employee data.