Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

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CROSS-FUNCTIONAL PARTNERSHIP AS INTERNAL MARKETING
many organisations has moved towards a ‘strategic human resource management’ approach, 
with a primary concern for aligning the skills and capabilities of employees and managers 
with the requirements of business strategy. The processes usually managed in HRM are 
extremely relevant to the goals of marketing strategy: recruitment and selection, evalua-
tion and reward system, training and development and other drivers of corporate culture. 
There is an opportunity for marketing to work with HRM in identifying the key elements 
of employee motivation, and the instigation of training and development programmes – 
but particularly in providing the research capabilities to evaluate the internal marketplace, 
including employees, channel partners and customer service providers (Schultz, 2002).
Some companies are making large efforts to ensure that marketing and HRM work 
together, to ensure that they communicate and deliver brand values to both internal and 
external audiences. The ‘Everything is Possible’ campaign at H-P Invest (formerly Hewlett-
Packard) is aimed to be as inspirational for staff as it is for customers. Allied-Domecq sees 
its ‘people brand’ as one of its nine core brands. Some companies, such as Allied-Domecq 
and Sainsbury’s, have appointed employer brand managers to bridge the gap between HR 
and marketing (Simms, 2003).
One view is that HR and marketing collaboration becomes critical when the priority 
is to maintain a coherent corporate brand and employer brand, and that the way forward 
is to: make internal brand management a strategic imperative; break down HR/marketing 
barriers; empower employees as brand ambassadors; establish and maintain aligned cor-
porate and employer brands; and build internal brand management around brand-centred 
HR practices (Brown, 2014). Nonetheless, many company practices clearly fall short of 
this ideal.
An internal marketing agenda concerned with the contribution of HRM to value pro-
cesses might include the following issues:
● 
the better alignment of employee and manager training and development processes with 
customer priorities;
● 
tracking and comparing employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction to understand 
the relationship between them;
● 
working on the links between customer satisfaction and retention issues, and employee 
training, reward and evaluation processes;
● 
looking at the way in which internal communications approaches support external mar-
ket strategies (Piercy, 2009a).
The importance of the marketing/HRM link is such that, in many situations, major cus-
tomers are increasingly playing a direct role in participating in the operation of suppliers’ 
internal HRM processes, such as recruitment into sales and service jobs.
Indeed, more operational views of the interface between marketing and HRM issues 
focus on the link between HRM and relationship marketing strategies (Perrien et al., 1993; 
Perrien and Ricard, 1995), and the need to direct HRM policies to focus on customer ser-
vice and customer value (Cripe, 1994; Gubman, 1995). Sheth and Mittal (1996) have even 
examined the use of HRM skills in the management of customer expectations. Nonethe-
less, research suggests that the marketing/HRM relationship is frequently associated with 
conflict and poor interdepartmental communication, with a detrimental impact on strategy 
implementation (Chimhanzi, 2004).
16.5.3 Marketing and finance and accounting
The conflict between marketing and finance/accounting in the past has reflected the goal 
of accounting to cut costs and to increase reported short-term profit, compared to the 
objective of marketing to gain long-term investment in brands and market share. Conflicts 
have also centred on different views of pricing – the accounting model of cost-plus pricing 
produces very different outcomes to a marketing model of price based on customer value. 
However, these disputes have been rendered largely obsolete by two important factors. The 

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