An Internal View of a Company´s Marketing and Relationships : - How to use marketing internally to strengthen relationships

• Main Authors: Gamhed, Martin, Lönroth, Karin
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för ekonomi och teknik (SET) 2011
• Subjects: Internal marketing; relationship building; communication; education; learning; leadership; motivation; recruiting; trust; commitment.
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15676

Satisfying customers’ needs and wants has for a long time been the main focus for many companies, and through this the idea of satisfying the employees’ needs and wants first in order to achieve this has appeared. This has led to a greater focus on internal marketing and thereby the internal customer. It has also in later years been found that internal marketing can be used to build strong internal relationships. Having strong internal relationships has been discovered to be of importance as employees who work with friends work harder, and the work environment becomes more motivating when the relationships between the parties are strong. Considering, that stronger relationships between employees and management as well as between one employee and another is beneficial for the company as a whole, as there is a need to nurture and develop these internal relationships. Therefore building relationships have been proposed as an alternative approach to internal marketing and that this may be the right way to explore the area, however this needs substantial further investigation. This would mean an investigation of how internal marketing can be used for building relationships within a company. It is on this problem that we base this dissertation and choose to raise the question:“How can a company use internal marketing to strengthen the relationships within?”In order to answer this question, literature focusing on internal marketing, relationship marketing and especially what types of factors that is important for building relationships are presented. Based on this literature we have built a proposed model that was tested in order to answer the research question for this dissertation. The model includes five internal marketing tools, which are communication, education and learning, leadership, motivation and recruiting. These were tested to see if they can be used as an aid to strengthen trust and commitment in the company and thereby build stronger relationships between the members. This through analyzing the theoretical framework and the proposed model with a qualitative case study made with Mediaprovider Scandinavia AB including participant observation as well as interviews with focus on the relevant subjects. It was established that companies can use internal marketing in a number of ways in order to strengthen the relationships within. These include using communication, education and learning, leadership, motivation and recruiting as tools that can be adapted in order to achieve this goal. The proposed model was therefore found to be a way of strengthening relationships, however it is beneficial to not only measure strengthened relationships by trust and commitment, as there are other elements that are of importance.