Internal marketing—The missing half of the marketing programme

Presents an interdisciplinary literature review and research agenda and suggests a number of propositions, in advance of new fieldwork, to discover a revised or new theory of internal marketing as it relates to organizational change management. The literature on marketing, services marketing, corporate strategy, total quality management, operations management, human resource management, and organizational development reveals a body of work referring to or describing an “internal marketing” concept or internal customer concept. This seems to have grown out of an organizational internal communications perspective and the notion of an “inner market” in the organization comprising “internal customers”. Provides an extensive overview of tactical and strategic issues relating to internal marketing. Presents a resulting model and includes a comprehensive bibliography is included, with suggestions for some themes for possible fruitful research in this area of change management and service quality management.

Internal marketing: a review and some interdisciplinary research challenges

How strong is the business-to-business brand in the workforce? An empirically-tested model of 'internal brand equity' in a business-to-business setting

Mergers and acquisitions are a high risk form of business activity involving the collective annual investment of billions of pounds and affecting the working lives of millions of employees. It has been suggested that in the long term between 50–80 per cent of all mergers are considered to be financially unsuccessful (Marks, 1988b), and in terms of financial return, represent ‘at best an each way bet’ (Lorenz, 1986).

The Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on People at Work: Existing Research and Issues

Drawing on the organization theory literature concerning configuration theory, competing values theory, and fit assessment methodologies, we examine the existence and performance impact of product market strategy–organization culture fit. Specifically, we assess the relationship among three important elements of a firm’s product market strategy and the four cultural orientations that comprise the competing values theory of organizational culture using primary and secondary data from the US trucking industry. Using two different conceptualizations and operationalizations of fit, our results provide the first empirical support for the existence of interrelationships among product market strategy decisions and organizational culture orientations consistent with configuration theory conceptualizations of product market strategy–organizational culture fit. We also find support for theorized but previously untested relationships between product market strategy–organizational culture fit and firms’ customer satisfaction and cash-flow return on assets (CFROA) performance. Since product market strategy is heavily reliant on the input of marketers, and organizational culture has long been recognized as having an important impact on marketing-related decision making, these findings have important implications for marketing strategy research and practice.

The impact of product market strategy-organizational culture fit on business performance

The authors' research interests in the impact of the corporate setting on determining and implementing corporate and marketing strategies follows the logic displayed in Figure 1. The basic premise is that while we know quite a lot about formulating strategies and producing plans, we actually know rather little about what is required to gain commitment or 'ownership' for those plans, and thus to have them put into effect. Our attention has been focusing for some time now on coping with the manager's statement: 'We know what marketing is, but we don't know how to do it'. Indeed, another writer has recently summarised the same point of concern:

Kenneth J. Peattie

Papers

Matching Marketing Strategies to Corporate Culture: The Parcel and the Wall: