The internal marketing (IM) concept was first proposed in the mid 1970s as a way of achieving consistent service quality – a major problem in the services area. Its basic premise was ‘to have satisfied customers, the firm must also have satisfied employees’ and that this could be best achieved by treating employees as customers, i.e. by applying the principles of marketing to job design and employee motivation. Since then, the concept has seen a number of major developments and its application is no longer confined to the services area. It has been shown that any type of organization can use IM to facilitate the implementation of its external marketing strategy or any other organizational strategies. However, despite nearly 25 years of development, the concept has not achieved the widespread recognition amongst mangers that it deserves. The major reason for this, we believe, is that the concept was well ahead of its time.

Internal marketing requires:

   the acceptance of marketing techniques and philosophy;

   customer orientation/market orientation;

   a participative approach to management;

   a strategic approach to human resource management (HRM) to ensure the alignment of HRM strategy with organizational strategy;

   the co-ordination of all management activity to achieve customer or market orientation or customer/market-focused management.

Marketing and the marketing philosophy came into prominence in the 1960s, yet it was not until the 1980s that it became widely accepted, practised and seen by most organizations as indispensable. Similarly, participative management gained wide acceptance in the 1980s, and the 1990s saw the emergence of the strategic approach to HRM. The need to align human resources to the organizational strategy is widely accepted and, more recently, the need to focus organizational resources towards customer/market orientation has gained ground in the emergence of market-focused management. These developments mean that conditions for the adoption of IM are optimal. This can be seen in the growth of interest in IM by managers and the rapid growth in the numbers of organizations adopting IM management practices. This is because IM tackles the issues and problems of implementing organizational strategies head on. This issue is neglected in most discussions of strategic management and marketing strategy. Numerous firms and organizations have discovered to their cost that formulation of brilliant strategies is next to useless without effective implementation.

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the concept of IM and help them to implement it within their own organization. The main features of the book are:

   it presents the state-of-the-art thinking and research in the IM area;

   it shows how IM strategy can be used to implement such diverse strategies as implementing marketing strategy, total quality management (TQM), new product development and knowledge management;

   it equips readers with IM techniques to enable them to use IM within their own organization;

   it includes practical case studies showing how IM is already being used within leading companies.

For convenience, the book is divided into three sections. Section I explains what internal marketing is all about, how it works, introduces the main internal marketing techniques, discusses the role of HRM in internal marketing, and discusses a framework for empowerment of employees. Section II provides detailed discussion of the implementation of internal marketing in three areas, namely TQM, new product development and the rapidly developing area of knowledge management. Section III contains a number of case studies showing how internal marketing was used to tackle specific management issues. Whilst we have included illustrations and examples throughout the text, we believe that the variety of approaches illustrated in the case studies is useful for illustrating the variety of approaches to internal marketing.