Internal Marketing

Introduction

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 ...