Marketing in the statistical service: Some Finnish experiences

Abstract

The word “marketing” in the context of public activities has been in recent years usually associated with the “privatization” of the public sector or at least with its development towards a set of market-oriented and businesslike activities. A traditional civil servant – or a statistician – has so far followed this development with rather strong reservations. No wonder, because the world view of a statistician actively marketing his or her services is so different from the world view of a traditional statistician as a civil servant or researcher.

In any case, we may find that the new kind of marketing-oriented statistician is a proper response to increasing requirements for more user orientation – a trend much discussed by statisticians for well over ten years. The traditional, somewhat inward-looking professional and the new outward-oriented salesman have to be combined somehow within the statistical service, because both are needed. Finnish experiences during the 1980s indicate that market orientation is useful for connecting the statistical service with the rest of the society, while the actual production of statistics still requires the traditional professional approach.