The application of traditional marketing concepts
to the internal market
In order to motivate employees towards customer consciousness
and service orientation, internal marketing has been proposed as a
way of applying the traditional marketing concepts and marketing
mix philosophy, originally developed for the company’s external
customers, to the internal customers of the organization. It was
hoped that by doing this internal employee relationships would
improve and hence corporate effectiveness.^15 Piercy and Morgan
argue, ‘the underlying purpose of what we are calling “internal
marketing” here is the development of a marketing programme
aimed at the internal marketplace in the company, that parallels and
matches the marketing programme for the external marketplace of
customers and competitors’ (p. 84).^31
This approach was eventually considered to be far too simplistic.
Specifically, it does not take into account all management and
employee-related issues which are fundamental to organizational
survival. Fundamental to the traditional approach of marketing is
the concept of exchange, that is, customers receive benefits by way
of products or services in exchange for payment. However, when
this concept is applied to employees it causes a number of problems.
Firstly, it can be argued that external customers ultimately have a
choice and can decide not to buy products or services from a partic-
ular supplier if they don’t want to; whereas with internal customers
the ‘product’ that they are being ‘sold’, for example, new ways of
providing customer service, may not be wanted or may even be per-
ceived by employees to make their jobs harder or more stressful. In
this sense they are obliged to ‘accept’ the new practice or otherwise
they may be forced to do so by the threat of disciplinary action. Also,
employees do not have available to them the same open market
competition as the external customer, who is able to select products
and services from a number of different suppliers. In the internal
market, there is usually only one ‘offer’.
Considerable attention has also been given to the development of
an internal marketing mix based on an analysis of the strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the internal market and
directed towards key target groups in the company. This approach
contrives to adapt McCarthy’s 4Ps framework into an extended
marketing mix for services,^21 originally intended for focusing activ-
ity on the external market, to fit with the internal marketing frame-
work. For example, ‘product’ in the internal marketing mix can refer
The recruitment and internal market domains 317