556 The Marketing Book
This was exceptionally expensive, and some
would argue that if the company had been able
to see these hidden costs of organizational
change at the outset they would have been well
advised to abandon the apparently ‘attractive’
marketing strategy. However, while the process
of change is continuing in this organization,
managers do now speak of the ‘cultural change’
in the organization and there are tangible
operating changes in how the two divisions
work together. This suggests that the process of
internal marketing and organizational change
described above may have had the effect of
creating new implementation capabilities for the
future in this company, and this may be the
primary long-term benefit created.
While the financial services example above
is primarily ‘top-down’, the case in Table 21.3
concerns a computer company, where the mar-
keting strategy was to adopt a vertical market-
ing approach to a small industry, where market
share had been lost. This case is primarily
concerned with the ‘bottom-up’ pressure by a
group of managers in a large organization to
pioneer and introduce a market-focused strate-
gic plan for a particular customer’s industry.
This was seen as part of a more general need to
move the whole of the organization from a
technology orientation where the prime pur-
pose was to sell ‘boxes’ (i.e. computers) to a
customer orientation with a main purpose of
producing customer business problem ‘solu-
tions’. Again, the internal marketing starts with
formal presentations, but continues to informal
communications and ways of dealing with the
hostile reaction of the established business
units to the weakening of their control over
resources. Ultimately, implementation of the
external vertical marketing strategy relied on
building teams to take ‘ownership’ of the new
strategy and to collaborate with key customers
in a cultural transition from technology orienta-
tion to customer orientation (which is what the
vertical marketing strategy was really about).
One critical element of this was a programme of
customer events, where a major objective was
simply to expose senior company managers to
customers and their views! Again, the strategy
was put in place with some limited degree of
success, but at some substantial costs. It is still
relatively early days with this strategy, but
there has been some success – some market
share has been regained at a difficult time for
the industry; the industry-specific marketing
activities have succeeded. However, far less has
been achieved in the related issue of industry-
specific products.
This suggests that in our present study of
the marketing implementation issue, strategic
internal marketing offers us three possible
advantages:1 It provides an operational framework for
analysing the internal changes necessary to put
the external marketing strategy into effect and
for building an internal programme to achieve
this.
2 As a framework it directly parallels
conventional external marketing – in analysing
the customers and building a marketing
strategy and programme around them – and
can be used at both an overt and relatively
superficial level, but can also go deeper into
the issues of process and culture in the
organization, if this is necessary to get to the
real implementation barriers and obstacles.
3 The strategic internal marketing framework
offers us a way of evaluating the costs of
implementation and organizational change early
enough that we can decide whether or not to
pursue the external strategy in question.Conclusions
There can be little doubt that one of the major
challenges facing marketing analysts in an era of
market turbulence and reinvented organiza-
tions is the construction and development of
better approaches to the implementation of
marketing plans and strategies. We saw initially
that this area is not simply problematic in its
own right, but that it is further complicated by