ABSTRACT*It has became fashionable to recommend ‘marketing’ to any public sector organization in financial difficulties or suffering from an image problem. Yet there are important tensions between the culture of marketing, derived mainly from Anglo‐Saxon models of manufacturing management, and the ethos and practice of public service management. We build upon Senge's model of a learning organization to question whether the use of conventional marketing approaches can be an aid to the most ambitious forms of organizational learning. A new public marketing is proposed which locates the concepts and techniques of marketing strategy within a learning model which makes explicit the political values and processes of public sector agencies. Such an approach requires a major rethink in the approach to marketing currently found in the UK public s