CASE STUDY: MARKETING IN PUBLIC SERVICES - MARKETING STRATEGY OF CROATIAN MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IN THE PROCESS OF REFORMING THE SYSTEM OF JUSTICE

According to Kotler, public institutions providing services to citizens use marketing in public services as an instrument of managing their relationships with public and instrument of influencing their perception on public institution's purpose and advancement. They also apply different communication strategies if they want to affect the citizen's behaviour, especially in terms of his cooperation and confidence to public institutions. However, public sector also encounters boundaries and limitation in their marketing and communication strategies due to specific services they provide and different social objectives they are trying to achieve, so we can not compare them entirely to marketing in profit-oriented private sector, neither they use same strategies. Public institutions always keep in mind their role in social community and a need to appeal to as wider audience they can, creating strong ties of cooperation and civil initiative. Despite all of the limitations, they could also benefit from their specific position due to accessibility to public and media on many communication levels and channels and public sources of financing. When a public institution faces a challenge of structural reform that has to be presented to public and requires an engagement of whole community, an issue of proper marketing and communication strategy arises. The Republic of Croatia is currently in the accession process to the European Union and one of the most significant reforms conducted by government is reform of the system of justice. It requires a comprehensive and prudent communication strategy on various levels and directed to various social subjects. By using various communication channels and adapting communication and marketing strategy, Croatian Ministry of Justice and government adress to the three target gropus: European Union and its public institutions, Croatian community of lawyers and law experts and Croatian citizens. The goals of marketing strategy are to engage experts in reform process and to present the objectives and results of judiciary reform to public. This reform also requires high participation of Croatian citizens and successful presentation of its results to European Institutions and European public. One of the key components of succes is also redefining reputation and respectability of Croatian judicial institutions in international community, but also in order to influence the confidence and loyalty of Croatian citizens to public institutions. Despite all of the legal criteria, the advancement in this process highly depends on perception of individuals and public. In this paper we analyze who are the most significant carriers in marketing strategy of judicial reform (key communicators), what are the objectives of this strategy and what are the instruments of its realization, who are the target public groups that communication strategy adresses to and how it adapts to each one, which communication channels key communicators choose and how the communication style adapts to these channels. The paper also discusses how succesful this strategy has beein in past time and what obstacles arise in its realization. Some of the obstacles are very specific and not related to the communication process at all, but rather related to the specificities of services that judiciary system provides, current regulation and social phenomenons such as corruption.