Marketing’s role in book on how Ghana can deliver public service excellence

Marketing has played a key role in a new book launched this week by Ghana’s Vice President, H.E Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang. 

The book argues that African governments have spent two decades measuring the wrong thing – and offers a specific interpretation of what resetting that habit would involve. 

‘Citizen Experience: A Reset for Superior Public and Civil Service Delivery’, co-authored by Chief of Staff, Hon. Julius K. Debrah and marketing professor Robert E. Hinson, contends that reform programmes across the continent keep failing not because of insufficient policy or funding, but because they are never judged against the one thing that actually matters to the public: what it feels like to deal with the state. 

Ghana, the authors note, has been publicly lamenting the quality of its public service for more than 20 years – successive presidents have spoken about it, vice presidents have directed agencies to improve, heads of the civil service have decried frontline attitudes, service charters have been published and digital platforms procured – while citizens in 2026 continue to encounter, in the authors’ words, the same queues, the same confusion and the same institutional indifference. 

The book draws a sharp line between customer experience – the private-sector marketing discipline behind familiar tools like Net Promoter Score and journey mapping – and what its authors call ‘Citizen Experience’. 

Where a dissatisfied bank customer can simply take their business elsewhere, the authors note, a citizen cannot take their passport application to a competing government office; the market discipline that improves private service simply does not exist for public institutions.  

Where a business may reasonably choose which customers to prioritise, a public institution that does the same is committing what the book calls an equity violation, since every citizen is entitled to the same service regardless of status. The authors argue this is why public institutions must be judged on dignity, equity and trust – not commercial metrics such as retention or satisfaction scores borrowed uncritically from the private sector. 

Why reforms don’t change the citizen experience 

Central to the book’s diagnosis is what it terms the ‘Citizen Experience Failure Cycle’ – five self-reinforcing institutional patterns that, the authors argue, explain why reform after reform has failed to change the citizen’s actual experience.  

It begins with policy announced without the operational redesign needed to deliver it – a target to cut land title registration from six months to 30 days, for instance, with no corresponding change to the processes or staffing that produce the delay.  

It continues through digitalisation without capability building, where a new portal is launched but officers are never trained to use it and continue processing applications manually; through published service standards that are never enforced, which the authors argue damages public trust more than making no promise at all; and through leadership that manages by compliance report rather than by reality, rewarding processing volume over whether a citizen’s problem was actually resolved.  

The cycle ends, the authors warn, in reform fatigue and citizen cynicism – a state in which staff no longer invest effort in reforms they have learned will not last, and citizens no longer believe the announcements that promise change. 

The book’s proposed remedy runs through leadership before it runs through systems or technology. Drawing on a comparison of two hospitals with identical budgets, staff and policy – one delivering care with consistent dignity, the other failing to – the authors argue that citizen experience is fundamentally a leadership product, caused far more often by leadership neglect than by active harm.  

Senior leaders, they argue, typically operate in information environments that insulate them from citizen reality; they get what they measure and reward, and in most African institutions that remains process compliance rather than citizen outcomes; and their silence in the face of routinely poor frontline conduct communicates, more powerfully than any policy statement, that citizen experience does not actually matter to the institution.  

The same leadership variable, the authors argue, is the most powerful available lever for the cure: leaders who personally and regularly experience their own institution’s queues and portals; outcome-based metrics that track waiting times and first-attempt resolution rather than activity; visible modelling of the behaviour leaders want to see; and genuine, consistently applied accountability for citizen experience performance, which the authors note is currently almost entirely absent from how African public institutions evaluate their leaders. 

The authors close their analysis with a case for a national measurement system, comparing the current absence of citizen experience data across Ghanaian government to a state flying blind – announcing reforms without any reliable way of knowing whether they have changed what a citizen experiences at the point of service.  

That case forms the empirical spine of the book’s Reset CiX Manifesto, which proposes a publicly reported National Citizen Experience Dashboard, updated quarterly and disaggregated by institution, as the mechanism that would finally make Ghana’s lamentation about public service quality answerable to evidence rather than repeated assertion.