Internal Marketing

Internal marketing is inward facing marketing. Internal marketing is used by marketers to motivate all functions to satisfy customers. With internal marketing the marketer is really extending and developing the foundations of marketing such as the marketing concept, the exchange process and customer satisfaction to internal customers.

Internal customers would be anybody involved in delivering value to the final customer. This will include internal functions within business with which marketing people interact including research and development, production/operations/Logistics, human resources, IT and customer services.

See also Strategic Internal Marketing.

There are many techniques that marketers can use to communicate with internal customers and functions. Firstly marketer would need to identify internal and external customers, including their different needs and wants. Secondly the marketing function will provide internal services such as intranets for human resources, internal recruitment, and companywide briefings and announcements. Finally the marketing team can provide extranet services for supporting activities in the supply chain. The supply chain connects internal and external manufacturers and producers, our internal business functions (as discussed above) and our final customer interface at wholesale, retail and ultimately at the consumption of our product and service.

Internal marketing is orienting a motivating customer contact employees and supporting service people to work as a team to provide customer satisfaction.

(Kotler and Armstrong 2010).

A marketing company would embed the basic principles of marketing such as company vision and mission, its overarching objectives, its business strategy, marketing tactics i.e. the marketing mix, and finally how we measure marketing success.

It’s important that a company recruits the right people. Marketing companies want people that are motivated by its products and services. Take Apple for example. If you visit an Apple store there is a purposefully designed customer experience, part of which is communicated by the Apple people. They are enthusiastic and very knowledgeable and actually uphold Apple principles and brand. They are purposely recruited, they are trained and retained, which is all part of human resource management and also a successful internal marketing program.

So with the Apple example above you can see that internal marketing ensures that internal staff now link with external customers in a customer relationship. Internal marketing meets external marketing. The basic chain links internally so the concept of the internal customer sees everybody within the organisation treating each other as customers. The Logistics manager would see a customer services function as his internal customers. The customer service function would see field engineers as their customers. The research and development team would see the manufacturing team as their customers. The relationship works in both directions, up and down the supply chain.