Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 16.3 
Internal and external marketing
Marketing and
business strategy
Internal
marketing
programmes
External
marketing
programmes
Strategy leads to
marketing programmes
aimed at market targets
But what has to change inside
the company for implementation
to be effective?
If implementation capabilities
and costs do not fit the strategy
how should the strategy be changed?

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467
THE SCOPE OF INTERNAL MARKETING
Figure 16.4
Content and 
structure of 
internal marketing 
programmes
Source: Adapted from 
Piercy (2009a).
Programme
Product
Price
Communications
Distribution
Contents
Examples
For example, the written plan,
the new company initiative
For example, stepping out of
comfort zones for new types
of operations
For example, reports, plans,
presentations, videos,
roadshows
For example, meetings,
workgroups, training sessions
and workshops, informal
meetings, social occasions
The strategy and the plan,
including the values, attitudes
and behaviours needed to
make them work
What we are asking internal
customers to ‘pay’ – other
projects abandoned,
personal and psychological
adjustment to change
Media and messages to
inform and persuade
Physical and social venues
for delivering the product
and communications
In this model, we take the internal marketing programme not only as an output of the 
planning process and the external marketing programme, but also as an input – that is, 
constraints and barriers in the internal marketplace should be considered and analysed as 
a part of the planning at both strategic and tactical levels. For the proposals to make sense 
in practice, we rely on this iterative relationship.
The starting point for this approach is that the marketing strategy and the planning 
process may define an external marketing programme in the conventional way, and less 
conventionally the internal barriers suggest that some external strategies are not capable 
of being implemented in the time-scale concerned, and we have to feed back into the plan-
ning process the message that some adjustments are needed while there is still time to make 
those adjustments to plans.
More positively, however, it is equally true that our analysis of the internal market may 
suggest new opportunities and neglected company resources that should be exploited, which 
in turn impact on our external marketing plan and thus on the planning process. What we 
are trying to make explicit for executives is the need to balance the impact of both internal 
and external market attributes on the strategic assumptions that they make in planning.
The structure of such an internal marketing programme is suggested in Figure 16.4 and 
can be presented in the following terms:
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