Marketing in the Public Sector: A Roadmap for Improved Performance

Chapter 11. Gathering Citizen Data, Input, and Feedback

“It has been fascinating to witness how research has given the average citizen a voice in developing South African tobacco control legislation for the 21^st century. In 1997, the National Department of Health was concerned about the World Health Organization’s warning that millions of women in developing countries were converting to tobacco use in spite of cultural prohibitions. We were tasked with determining how vulnerable black African women were to becoming tobacco users, even though they had the lowest rate of smoking (7%).

Many barriers had to be overcome to reach women in volatile, high crime township areas, and interview them in their home language, Xhosa. Our solution was to train ...