Marketing implementation, organizational change and internal marketing strategy 551
marketing plans, then the conventional lit-
erature offers little other than action plans and
schedules. One method which has proved
useful in coping with the implementation
issue is to use strategic internal marketing.
Internal marketing can encompass many dif-
ferent issues relevant to strategy implementa-
tion. In different circumstances, the internal
marketing process might include the following
types of activity and programme:
Gaining the supportof key decision-makers for
our plans – but also all that those plans imply
in terms of the need to acquire personnel and
financial resources, possibly in conflict with
established company ‘policies’, and to get what
is needed from other functions like operations
and finance departments to implement a
marketing strategy effectively.
Changing some of the attitudes and behaviourof
employees and managers, who are working at
the key interfaces with customers and
distributors, to those required to make plans
work effectively (but also reinforcing effective
attitudes and behaviour as well).
Winningcommitmentto making the plan work
and ‘ownership’ of the key problem-solving
tasks from those units and individuals in the
firm whose working support is needed.
Ultimately, managing incremental changes in the
culturefrom ‘the way we always do things’ to ‘the
way we need to do things to be successful’ and
to make the marketing strategy work.
Buildingkey internal alliances, for example with
human resource management, to influence
employee skills and behaviour, or with the
sales organization to link marketing imperatives
to salesperson behaviour.
In fact, it follows from the emergence of the
internal marketing paradigm from diverse con-
ceptual sources that the practice of internal
marketing and its potential contribution to
marketing strategy are similarly varied. It is
possible to consider the following ‘types’ of
internal marketing, although they are probably
not equal in importance:
internal marketing that focuses on the
development and delivery of high standards of
service qualityand customer satisfaction;
internal marketing that is concerned primarily
with developing internal communications
programmesto provide employees with
information and to win their support;
internal marketing which is used as a
systematic approach to managing the adoption
of innovationswithin an organization;
internal marketing concerned with providing
products and services to users inside the
organization; and
internal marketing as the implementation
strategyfor our marketing plans.Here we are concerned mainly with the last of
these.
The purpose of this approach is to capture
our ideas about what has to be done to close the
strategic gaps we have found, or to gain the
effective implementation of our external mar-
keting plans and strategies. The attraction of
the framework is that it utilizes the same
structure and analytical tools as external mar-
keting planning, and directly parallels this
familiar process throughout. The specific goals
of the internal marketing strategy are taken
directly from the requirements of the external
marketing strategy.
One way of presenting this to a company
is shown in Figure 21.7. This model suggests
that internal marketing sits alongside external
marketing and can be put into exactly the
same structure. Internal marketing is taken as
the output from the conventional external
marketing programme – it simply asks for
each element of the external marketing strat-
egy and programme, what will be required
inside the company: who will have to change
what they do, learn new ways of doing things,
give up existing practices, free resources and
time, and so on. However, internal marketing
analysis is also an inputto the conventional
planning process, in identifying both the con-
straints and barriers in the internal market-
place, as well as important capabilities which