Implementation Through Internal Marketing

The paper takes into consideration the role of internal marketing in enhancing and sustaining a company’s ability to compete: · much new thinking and practice in strategic marketing is concerned with managing relationships: with the customer, and with partners in strategic alliances. However, a further aspect of relationship management and relationship marketing is the relationship with the employees and managers, upon whose skills, commitment and performance the success of a marketing strategy unavoidably relies. This is the internal market inside the company; · we have emphasized the centrality of competitive differentiation to build market position. Let truly exploiting a company’s potential competitiveness and its capabilities in reality is often in the hands of what Evert Gummesson (1990) has called the “part-time marketers”. Indeed, in some situations, the employees of a company may be the most important resource that provides differentiation; · in a similar way, the growing emphasis on competing through superior service quality relies ultimately on the behaviour and effectiveness of the people who deliver the service, rather than the people who design the strategy; · indeed, increasingly it is recognized that one of the greatest barriers to effectiveness is strategic marketing lies not in a company’s ability to conceive and design innovative marketing strategies or to produce sophisticated marketing plans, but in its ability to gain the effective and enduring implementation of those strategies. A route to planning and operationalizing implementation in strategic marketing is “strategic internal marketing” (Cespedes and Piercy, 1996). The potential importance of internal marketing to relationship marketing strategies to strategic alliances, to competitive differentiation, to delivering superior service quality and to effective marketing implementation is underlined by the growing emphasis placed by companies in this issue.