In the early 1990’s more and more companies of the Swedish public sector were exposed to competition, and this started the debate on how such actions might affect the business and even society.

The first chapter examines how the public sector and especially health care, is financed and managed. We also explore what it means to be exposed to competition and find that there are many different ways of exposing the public sector to competition. The study examines dental care as an example of a market with both publicly and privately owned companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how publicly and privately owned health care companies view their relationship with their consumers. The question that this paper seeks to answer is: "Are there any differences between publicly and privately owned dental care companies in how they communicate with their consumers?"

Communication in this study refers to planned communication such as advertisement and websites, as well as the message the consumer receives when interacting with the product or service that is delivered. Two dental care companies in the city of Stockholm are examined in this comparative case study, one is owned by the public sector and one is a privately owned company.

This paper concludes that publicly and privately owned dental care companies communicate with their consumers in slightly different ways. Privately owned dental care companies include their employees and use word of mouth in their communication to a higher extent than dental care companies owned by public sector. We suggest that this could mean that privately owned companies view their consumers as customers who need to be convinced, whereas publicly owned companies are more informative in their communication suggesting they view their consumers more like patients who need to be educated. Because unplanned communication was not examined in this study, this is suggested as a future field of research, to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between consumer and company.