An important ingredient of strategic planning is a firm’s core competency. Core competency can lead to a competitive advantage for the firm. One form of competitive advantage is customer service and the result is unwavering customer loyalty. Interna...
An important ingredient of strategic planning is a firm’s core competency. Core competency can lead to a competitive advantage for the firm. One form of competitive advantage is customer service and the result is unwavering customer loyalty. Internal marketing is the key to superior service and the result is external marketing success.
The objectives of internal marketing are to attract good employees, to retain good employees, to ensure and motivate the employees, and to have a service-minded performance.
Internal marketing is viewing employees as internal customers, viewing jobs as internal products and then endeavoring to offer internal products that satisfy the needs and wants of these internal customers while addressing the objectives of the organization.
Internal marketing means two types of management process; attitude management and communication management. The task of attitude management is to motivate mentally prepared personnel for the service encounter. Communication management manages and controls personnel and customers needs information about the service to be able to manage their task and to get appropriate expectations.
Three different types of situations can be identified where internal marketing is called for when creating a service culture in the firm and a service orientation among the personnel, when maintaining a service orientation among the personnel, and when introducing new goods and services as well as marketing campaigns and activities to the employees.
Typical internal marketing activities are training and educating, internal interactive
communication, internal and external mass communication, internal sales promotion, human resource management, and market segmentation.
In conclusion, internal marketing means applying the philosophy and practices of marketing to the people who serve the external customers so that the best possible people can be employed and retained and they will do the possible work. Therefore, for internal marketing strategy to be successful, the idea of internal marketing must originate at the top and to be communicated down to the bottom of the firm and top level management must realize that understanding customer expectation is a prerequiste for delivering superior service.