Internal marketing in manufacturing organizations: An exploratory study

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is a key to an organization’s competitive advantage. Every interaction of the customers’ with the company influences their satisfaction and their perception towards that company. This is clear in case of a service. The service employees play a crucial role in shaping customers perception, attitude and opinion about a company and are one of the most crucial factors in delivering satisfactory customer experience. Internal Marketing - which seeks to motivate employees in all functions to consistently deliver a satisfying customer experience has been well studied in service organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore Internal Marketing in non-service organizations such as a manufacturing firm to find out the status of Internal Marketing in that organization. The methodology adopted here were two fold. Firstly, a survey was conducted among the employees of the organization using a questionnaire. Secondly, personal interview was held with the top-level management. Measures used in this study were drawn from earlier study “Internal-market orientation and its measurement” by Gounaris in 2006. Reliability of research instrument was tested by a pilot study and data was collected using convenience sampling. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was used for analyzing data.