Endomarketing

The Integration of Internal Marketing Into the Organizational ... Page 1 of 5

The Integration of Internal Marketing Into the Organizational Culture of Service Firms Tracy A. Suter, University of Arkansas Marketing is a term usually reserved for the process of marketing a product, service, or idea to the final consumer outside the firm. It could be argued, however, that marketing also takesplace within an organization. In this instance the "market " is not only the ultimate consumer but also an individual, or a group of individuals, within the organization. These internal "customers " are potentially as important as the external customers due to their impact on the firm's culture. The purpose of this paper is to show how internal marketing can impact the culture of an organization. Therole of internal marketing is to develop an organizational culture based on quality customer service at every level of the organization. Customer service both inside and outside the organization is especially important in service firms because the service is often inseparable from the provider. Introduction The topic of organizational culture is important to the study of internal marketing andvis versa. For service firms, in particular, the existence of an appropriate culture is a key element (Webster, 1992). A customer-oriented environment often results from an internal marketing endeavor. Internal marketing is more than a strategy; it represents efforts to change the values and beliefs of an organization by promoting the firm and its products and services to employees (George, 1990).Shared values and beliefs within an organization are terms that are often used to define an organization's culture (Deshpande and Webster, 1989). Thus, this paper will discuss the concepts of internal marketing and organizational culture, and propose the integration of these two concepts. The importance of integrating internal marketing concepts into the organizational culture is based upon thecustomer-oriented perspective inherent in the concept of internal marketing. An enhanced sense of customer-orientation within the firm is a key element leading to successful external marketing, enhanced customer satisfaction, and increased overall performance of the firm, especially service firms. Internal Marketing Internal marketing has been described as the implementation of a human resourcemanagement philosophy based on a marketing perspective (George and Gronroos, 1989). The internal marketing concept states that the internal market is best motivated for service-mindedness where marketing like activities are used internally, 1990). Greene, Walls, and Schrest (1994) discuss these marketing activities in terms of promotion of both the firm and its products/service offerings. Management inservice industries therefore need to market a customer orientation to its employees as a means of impacting the quality of the firm and its service outputs. This is especially important in service firms since they cannot easily differentiate their services on the basis of mere technical quality of the outcome rendered to the customers (Gronroos, 1982). They recognize that as the intangibility ofthe service offering increases, there is greater need to pay attention to the details of service delivery (Bowen and Schneider, 1988). Given the intangibility of services, management in service industries have a more limited span of control over the services being provided. An internal marketing philosophy which stresses the importance of a customer orientation can help employees to recognize thatin many instances they, as the external customers' only contact with the firm's offerings, become both the firm and its service from the

file://C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\1995\SMA\95swa423.htm

5/24/04

The Integration of Internal Marketing Into the Organizational ... Page 2 of 5

customers' perspective. In other words, the human performance of the employees materially shapes the service...