532 The Marketing Book
To underline the need for an active and
effective approach to implementation in mar-
keting, we adopt an internal market per-
spective and focus on the underlying problem
of the strategy formulation–implementation
dichotomy – the all too common situation
where we ignore implementation capabilities in
developing strategy, and then stand back in
amazement when we find the strategy never
gets executed effectively, or at all.
An internal market perspective
One useful and practical approach to under-
standing the significance of organizational
change and development to marketing strategy
implementation is through an internal market
perspective (Piercy, 1995, 1998a). The impor-
tance of this internal market perspective in
developing coherent marketing implementa-
tion strategies can be underlined as follows:
Much contemporary thinking and practice in
strategic marketing is concerned with managing
relationships: with the customer, with those
who influence customers’ decisions, with
competitors, 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. The
logic being followed by an increasing number
of companies is that building effective
relationships with customers and alliance
partners will depend in part (and possibly in
large part) on the strengths and types of
relationships built with employees and
managers inside the organization. Much of the
competitive strength of firms as diverse as
Kwik-Fit, Rosenbluth International and Asda
can be traced to those companies’ ability to
win the hearts and minds of their employees
and managers (Piercy, 2002).
Many companies emphasize the critical need
for competitive differentiationto build market
position. Yet truly exploiting a company’s
potential competitiveness and its capabilities in
reality is often in the hands of what Evert
Gummesson (1991) has called the ‘part-time
marketers’, i.e. the people who run the
business and provide the real scope for
competitive differentiation. Indeed, in some
situations, the employees of a company may be
the most important resource that provides
differentiation – Avis achieves high customer
satisfaction and customer retention through its
superior employee skills and attitudes, not
because the cars it rents out are any different
from those of its competitors (Piercy, 2002).
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. Appositely, in considering the issue of
intellectual capital, Thomas Stewart (1998)
writes: ‘Many jobs still require big, expensive
machines. But in an age of intellectual capital,
the most valuable parts of those jobs are the
human tasks: sensing, judging, creating and
building relationships.’
Indeed, increasingly it is recognized that one of
the greatest barriers to effectiveness in
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
implementationof those strategies. One route
to planning and operationalizing
implementation in strategic marketing is
‘strategic internal marketing’ – applying the
tools and techniques of marketing to the
internal as well as the external marketplace.We will examine the implementation question
in marketing and then introduce strategic inter-
nal marketing as a managerial approach to
dealing with the organizational problems
uncovered by our analysis.