1.1 The Origins of Internal Marketing
The concept of marketing arose with the aim of identifying the needs and desires of customers/consumers, enabling companies, through their resources and tools, to respond to the needs of their users, and thus obtain a positive result for the organisation through sales growth, increased market share, or greater value for their products (Kotler and Keller, 2012). But marketing can't just be seen in terms of the external customer; its actions and strategies can also be focussed on the internal public of companies: the employees. This aspect is called internal marketing.
The concept of internal marketing is not a new one. For some time now, human resources professionals and other managers have been concerned about actions or campaigns aimed specifically at company employees, but it was only in the mid-1970s that specific terms began to appear in the literature (Grönroos, 2009).
The origins of internal marketing date back to the 1970s, when the importance of considering the needs of employees was identified so that they could offer quality services to satisfy external customers. According to Berry et al. (1976), internal marketing could be applied to change organisational capacity and not just the provision of services, while the internal communication to be promoted would make it possible to understand the difficulties in customer service, developing the potential of employees in the execution of a superior service. In this way, internal marketing was seen as a solution for companies to offer exceptional service. According to these authors, activities such as publicising decisions made, obtaining frequent feedback, training and rewarding employees who serve customers with excellence fulfil the objective of internal marketing.
Sharing the same view, Sasser and Arbeit (1976) argued that organisations should understand their employees as their first market. From this relational perspective, internal marketing means that managers and other members of the organisation are partners. Everyone in the organisation should be treated as a customer, and it is important to create an environment of trust and organisational well-being.
Given this view, it is definitely important to mention the value of the Nordic school, which has made a very important contribution to the study of internal marketing. The origins of this school date back to the early 1970s, through the research of Christian Grönroos and Evert Gummesson. It is a school of marketing that has dedicated itself to researching services marketing in Scandinavia and Finland, thus gaining international knowledge. In the 1990s, it was developed into a relational marketing school of thought (Grönroos, 2000a; Grönroos, 2000b). It should be noted that it was researchers from the Nordic school who emphasised the nature of the relationship and long-term service marketing, creating terms such as buyer-seller interactions; customer relationship life cycle; internal marketing and marketers (Gummesson, 2000). This author emphasises the importance that employees have in the relationship with customers, since they directly influence consumer perceptions without belonging to the marketing or sales department.
Given the complexity of the concept, various definitions have been developed and to date there is no consensus definition (Ahmed and Rafiq, 2003). In fact, this area still lacks studies to consolidate its importance as an academic discipline and organisational management philosophy, which is why its practical application is not yet widespread in companies.