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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BOX 11.1
THE MARKETING OF MARKETING 
Compton (1987: 17–20) urged employees of the American Red Cross to treat
‘marketing’ as ‘a way of thinking and acting about what we do based on the concept
of exchange’ rather than as PR, advertising, selling, and a management tool. The
approach taken to achieve this way of thinking was to market marketing internally
among employees.

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Marketers may have different roles in different parts of the corporation,
which should be market-driven (i.e. responsive to customers) but not
necessarily always marketing-driven (i.e. controlled by marketers using
marketing tools such as advertising). Essentially, then, internal marketing is
concerned with engendering market-oriented management (Grönroos, 1983)
in which marketing is not a function but rather a way of doing business
(McKenna, 1991).
Gilmore and Carson (1995: 300) offer a helpful definition of internal
marketing as:
the spreading of the responsibility for all marketing activity across 
all functions of the organisation, and the proactive application of
marketing principles to ‘selling the staff’ on their role in providing
customer satisfaction within a supportive organisational environment.
A ROUTE TO MARKETING ORIENTATION
The problem of implementing strategic change plans has been increasingly
recognized and has received major attention in the literature by both general
management and, more specifically, marketers. There are a number of
recurring difficulties in the effective implementation of major new plans,
which inevitably imply and require change:
• the changes proposed may not fit with organizational culture or resource
constraints and capability, i.e. the plan is not implementable
• decisions are made on data which subsequently proves to have failed to
indicate changes in the environment, such as competitor moves or changes
in consumer preferences
• rigid plans which are too analytical are adhered to even when performance
variances should signal problems
• there is a lack of ownership and therefore commitment on the part of
managers
• differences between senior management and issues of power and vested
interest are often not addressed
• strategy changes are often decided out of context without due
consideration of the corporation’s prevailing culture, hence the way of
implementing decisions remains unchanged and becomes incompatible
with the required way of working
• customers and their specific needs are not clearly identified
• other failures in information flow and decision-making
Much of this can be accounted for by the continuing widespread practice of
treating planning and implementation as separate, the failure of planners to
involve those who will be required to take the necessary action, and the
prevalent failure of managers to communicate the content and rationale of
their plans to the rest of the members of the corporation.