Government Branding
Branding your agency is not aping the private sector or selling out to Madison Avenue. Branding a government agency or service is as important as any other way you engage the consumers of the services you offer.
You will soon come to understand that if you ask 10 experts to outline the branding process you are likely to end up with 10 different outlines. But simply put branding is the process by which an agency establishes the image by which it wants the public to know it.
Private sector marketers have the luxury of narrowcasting to a target audience. Branding in the public sector differs in that the target audience is likely to be comprised of several sub-audiences whose common denominator may only be that they hold the drivers licenses your agency is responsible for, or that their financial circumstances make them eligible for the food stamps your agency issues.
Properly identifying those sub-audiences will be critical to developing your brand.
In addition, often public sector branding campaigns focuses too much on what agency management thinks about the nascent brand, and not enough on the rank and file workers who are the ones who interact on a daily basis with the customers. Therefore, any agency branding campaign should hold council with workers whose job titles are “clerk” “eligibility technician” or their equivalent in your agency.
Finally, any public sector branding campaign must include the agency’s customers, in order to develop a baseline understanding of the agency’s current public image. Without this starting point it will be difficult to develop an effective brand for future growth.
Remember that the goal is customer engagement.
We have worked with government for 25 years and offered marketing services for a like period.
For more information, https://www.digitalgov.gov/2014/07/25/5-key-points-about-government-branding-now/