Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Internal marketing evaluation 
This is what we can measure to see if we are getting there, ideally quantified and objective: 
for example, reduced customer complaint rates or higher customer satisfaction scores. This 
may be ambitious and we should not abandon important objectives because they are dif-
ficult to evaluate – we may have to settle for a subjective or qualitative evaluation, which is 
better than nothing. 
However, the possible problems to be anticipated in implementing internal marketing 
strategy programmes effectively should not be underestimated. For example, Don Schultz 
suggests that many, if not most, internal marketing approaches fail, for the following reasons: 
● 
Lack of financial measures of internal marketing success – not achieving the goal of 
linking measurable behavioural changes to financial returns for the business.
● 
Weak management cohesion – the organisational location of responsibility for internal 
marketing is confused and those responsible have no authority or responsibility for the 
people whose behaviours they are trying to change.
● 
Lack of senior management support – internal marketing is not perceived as a senior 
management issue, but the concern of middle managers with all the inherent problems 
of turf wars and organisational politics.
● 
No connection between internal stakeholders and external customers – the difficulty for 
employees in non-customer-facing roles to understand how internal marketing affects 
them, or how they affect the external customer.
● 
Lack of a management calculus – no clear ideas about the value or return of internal 
marketing and no effective internal marketing planning system.
For example, one initiative at Wells Fargo, the San Francisco bank, is the happy/grumpy 
ratio, to measure the proportion of cheery staff versus the less happy. The company believes 
that happy employees are more likely to do the right thing than unhappy people, so it 
measures the proportions. It reports that, over the course of five years, the ratio of happy 
to grumpy improved from 3.8:1to 8:1, suggesting the effectiveness of the policy ( Kellaway, 
2015 ). That said, in 2016, Wells Fargo was accused of encouraging unethical practices 
among its sales staff, and numerous reports emerged of a negative performance-at-all-costs 
culture in the sales staff. This illustrates the point that companies need to align incentive 
structures and the like with any corporate culture initiatives. Just encouraging ‘happiness’ 
in itself is rarely enough to outweigh performance incentives that encourage the wrong 
types of behaviour. 
Schultz (2004) suggests that we should apply the lessons of integrated marketing com-
munications in internal as well as external marketing. However, the issue of integration has 
yet further practical aspects, as we see in the next section of the chapter.
16.5 
Cross-functional partnership as internal marketing 
16.5.1 Rationale for cross-functional partnership 
Perhaps the greatest contemporary challenge for internal marketing is the achievement of 
the effective cross-functional partnerships required to deliver superior customer value. Two 
things are increasingly apparent. 

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