Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Table 16.1 
The role of internal communications

---

465
THE SCOPE OF INTERNAL MARKETING
An interesting illustration of the gains from two-way communications comes from Dana 
Corp, the US car parts manufacturer. At that company, the ‘suggestions box’ is described 
by the CEO as ‘a core part of our value system’. Employees contribute ideas to improve 
operations and service, and 70 per cent are actually used. Dana is an example of an organi-
sation where employees have taken a share of the responsibility for keeping the company 
competitive. This underlines the important practical difference between producing com-
pany newsletters and taking internal communications seriously.
Indeed, some major companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Cisco Systems, are 
actively seeking out the employees who are most influential inside the organisation because 
of their social links and social media communications. The logic is to harness the clout of 
these influencers to identify new product opportunities, get other employees on board with 
big changes and spread information throughout the organisation. The twenty-first century 
is very much the era of the network (Feintzeig, 2014; Mattu, 2011). Others use ‘reverse 
mentoring’ and have employees mentor managers – for example, informing them about 
the reality of social media or bridging the ‘generation gap’ so that managers understand 
younger consumers and employees better – an established practice at Tesco, Deloitte’s and 
GE (Jacobs, 2013).
16.3.3 Internal marketing and innovation management
Somewhat different is the use of the internal marketing framework to place and gain use of 
innovations, such as computers and electronic communications in the IT field. These appli-
cations use tools of market analysis and planning to cope with and avoid resistance and to 
manage the process of change. This may be particularly important where the effectiveness 
of a marketing strategy relies on the adoption of new technologies and ways of working. 
The argument here is that people in an organisation are ‘customers’ for the company’s ideas 
and innovations. This view encourages us to consider:
●