Marketing communication: principles and practice

I N T E R N A L M A R K E T I N G C O M M U N I C A T I O N
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(people, skills, commitment, etc.) create and convey the image to the outside
environment. Corporate image is the outcome of an expressive strategy.
Corporations actively seek to create an ‘image’ of themselves that can also
be used in managing internal processes. Corporate identity is the symbolic–
affective aspects of the collective human resources.
INTERNAL MARKETING AS A CORPORATE
INTEGRATOR
Internal marketing has a role in reducing conflict between the functional
groups of the corporation by eroding barriers through improved sharing of
information and alignment of objectives around external customer
satisfaction and marketing principles. Internal partnering is an overt approach
to reducing internal conflict and for improving organizational effectiveness
and efficiency. 
When functional groups perform specialized portions of the totality of
business tasks of an enterprise, this may be a convenient form of organization
for the company. The impact on the customer’s judgement of service may
be little understood or underemphasized. This traditional approach to
organization design is the epicentre for much intra-organizational conflict
and the source of many strategy implementation problems. Cross-functional
coordination requires attention to organization design, improved communi-
cation, and decision-support systems. Improvements in the degree of
collaboration can lead to better products that enter the market faster. Groups
with either demand-generation (e.g. sales and marketing) or supply-meeting
(e.g. production, logistics, customer billing, training and development)
responsibilities recognize their interdependence in working together to meet
all targeted customer needs.
The sales force is often the first ‘customer’ of the designer, producer, 
and engineering and technical support staff (for pre-sale and post-sale
support). Technical support staff need to understand the service needs 
of both the sales force and the end customer. There is an assumption 
here that improved internal coordination can lead to improved service 
quality and thus to strengthened relationships with end-customers (see 
Figure 11.1).
Congram 
et al
. (1987) urge managers to work for internal integration to
achieve unity of wholeness because responsibility for service delivery and
response to customers is shared throughout the service organization.
Grönroos (1990: 223) defined his internal marketing concept as:
a unifying concept for more effectively managing a variety of inter-
functional, and frequently well-established activities, as part of an
overall framework aiming at a common objective.
It is increasingly being recognized that corporations are networks of
interacting and interdependent groups. Organizational structure alone is
insufficient to deal with power dependencies and relationships, and here