Marketing implementation, organizational change and internal marketing strategy 553
working for the real customer commitment
they need from their employees if their
service-based external marketing strategies are
to work. Their practices involve giving external
customers a significant role in such internal
processes as: staff recruitment and selection
decisions; staff promotion and development
choices; staff appraisal, right from setting the
standards to measuring the performance;
operating staff reward systems, both financial
and non-financial; organizational design
strategies; and internal communications
programmes. This suggests that the most
potent distribution channel for internal
marketing may also be more to do with
process and culture than simply holding
meetings or sending out written
communications.
Market research. As with external marketing,
we need to remember the role of research
and analysis techniques in identifying the
internal market characteristics and changes
which are significant to the implementation of
our external strategies.
It will be apparent from the way the internal
marketing structure has been described above
that we are concerned with far more than
simply producing ‘glossies’ to persuade people
in the organization to support our marketing
strategy (although this may be one of the things
that we have to do in some situations). We may
end up more concerned with the underlying
process and culture of the organization, and
thus its real capabilities to implement a market-
ing strategy. This again directly parallels the
way we look at the external customer – at
different levels.
For example, Tables 21.2 and 21.3 summ-
arize two company cases, where the internal
marketing framework is used at different levels
to understand the real implementation prob-
lems and to develop appropriate responses, i.e.
effective implementation responses. To make
the levels clearer, the tabulated cases suggest
that we look at internal marketing first at a
formallevel, where the concern is with open
and rational presentation issues, second at an
informallevel, where the issues are about the
‘inner workings’ of the company, and third at a
processuallevel, where we confront the under-
lying processes of change in the organization
and the cultural barriers we may face.
The case summarized in Table 21.2
describes the problems faced in a financial
services organization in implementing a strat-
egy of key customer focus, developed by a
central team of planners, but relying on branch
management co-operation and commitment – as
well as requiring the collaboration of two
traditionally separate and competing field divi-
sions – for effective implementation. The desira-
bility of this strategy was well known in the
company, and it had frequently been included in
the group marketing plan, but with little or no
success in implementation. The analysis in Table
21.2 suggests that while there were practical
barriers to implementing the strategy at tactical
level – threats to commission earnings, the need
for better market information, and so on – there
were far more substantial, but covert, blockages
to implementation hidden in the culture of the
organization. As a result, it can be seen that
simply issuing written plans and instructions
achieved little, and neither did ‘sabre-rattling’
by the chief executive. In fact, although attrac-
tive in attacking the external market, it was also
true that the new strategy would have a
considerable and unwelcome impact on the
power and freedom of decentralized managers,
compared to the planners at the centre, and
would substantially change their evaluation and
earnings prospects. More intractable still were
the political barriers represented by the costs to
the managers concerned with collaborating with
counterparts in another division, who had
historically been perceived at best as com-
petitors – a cultural divide made worse by ethnic
and educational background differences
between the divisions. Implementation of the
strategy was only achieved after operating on
the process and culture of the company by
building joint planning and problem-solving
teams from the two divisions on a regional basis.