The importance of internal marketing through internal communications and human resource management

Abstract

A position stated to be “luxury” for a company to occupy, especially on a crisis period, is that of the Human resource manager. It is an extra cost to employ people in charge of making sure the employees are happy, motivated and inspired to keep doing their jobs efficiently. On the other hand companies rely on the service they provide to their customers, which is provided by employees. If the service is satisfying, the customer will come back and maybe become a client, so it is merely important to keep those employees in the front line highly motivated to provide their best of their knowledge, skills and impressions to the customers about their services.

Comparing that HRM is an extra cost and how HRM can impact on employee’s behaviour against the customer, we observe the contradiction occurring here. So considering that a company is too small to have a whole department to manage the human resources, this can be the idea that each manager can use in order to show to their employees that are countable for the organisation. This can be the philosophy in order to treat your employees as if they were customers! Motivating and retaining your employees can retain customers as well. As with customers we are using marketing approaches, simple as that with our internal customers (employees), we can use the internal marketing combined through the internal communications and manage our people appropriately.

The purpose of this study is to collect existing researches and conduct a scientific research ending with the distribution of a questionnaire that will complete the conclusion of previous researches. Selecting the parts from the bibliography that help this research, separating them into chapters will result in the first conclusions based on theory and past surveys. Finally the empirical research is done by using a primary questionnaire for further investigation on what employees understand in our days in Cyprus in regards of Internal Marketing and of course what their experience in their companies’ is.

The objective of the above is to learn the extent to which the internal marketing processes are applied into business, if market orientation exists within the business, and last but not least to investigate if organizations are creating value for their customers. In the reference are found the articles, books, electronic resources and the questions used in the survey.

In the first two chapters of this study, there are explanations and analysis of the main theoretic terms used. Additionally in the introduction there is the discussion of the subject and some reference on what it is believed through the years about Internal Marketing. The following chapters are focusing on the satisfaction of the internal and external environment of an organization in a theoretical basis. The last chapter before the discussion and conclusions, the conduction of the survey is analysed, by introducing the results in percentages with presented in pie charts and the cross tabulation analysis through excel. In this chapter it is discussed as well the weaknesses of this survey and the observations of the results in a first stage.

Finally, in the discussion and conclusions, some of positive and negative aspects are mentioned and the final conclusions are explained and recommendations for further investigations are suggested.