Internal Relationship Marketing Research Articles

Internal relationship marketing: a key to enhanced supply chain relationships

Competitive market pressures within today’s contemporary business environments have encouraged the partnership of many supply chain members. Of particular interest is the development of successful relationships between firms in an effort to gain product and service quality and efficiency that would otherwise go left unclaimed. This research specifically identifies the need for supply chain members to foster healthier relationships within the firm in order to realize more fully success and obtain the benefits associated with external partnerships. The concept of internal relationship marketing is employed and a model is proposed to aid companies in identifying the variables associated with marketing to the internal customer. The motor carrier industry provides an appropriate service setting for the analysis, and implications for retaining the very best customer‐conscious frontline employees are outlined.

Leadership Life and Emotions in Virtual Teams

A major challenge in this millennium will be the management of corporate identity and socialisation processes in a distributed, networked or virtual company where boundaries between and external are increasingly permeable. The nature of company-customer-supplier constellations or value webs require and initiate greater levels of collaboration as well as competition as Paul Saffo noted at the Theseus workshop on the theme of the emergent corporation (1995). Employees a) may be recruited for specific projects or short contract periods b) may never have met superiors or colleagues, c) never have had an unmediated face-to-face interaction with clients/customers. Identity, habitus, esprit de corps, image will require different tools and techniques than those currently employed. Knowledge management for competitive advantage in learning organisations will require collaboration between these empowered professional, information workers. The learning arena and social field of interaction in a digitised environment for such freelancers presupposes that the potential for anomie is counterbalanced by some other means of encouraging collaboration, corporate image-value identification and self-organised learning. Operating via electronically mediated, geographically-dispersed teams, the cash nexus will not remain a sufficient motivation to generate creative relationships with tasks, customers, colleagues and the corporation as a whole. Much of the corporate habitus will be embodied as tacit learning, memory and knowledge. Substantial tacit knowledge conversion and capture will thus be necessary in relatively short time periods for new product development, internal relationship marketing and telephony-based customer service externally. We have carried out a series of consulting and action research projects with local companies in South Wales since 1996. Companies ranged from Small to Medium Enterprises (S.M.E.s) to major financial services corporations. Some projects were in conjunction with the Wales Quality Centre, others with teams of our M.B.A.s as part of their assessed, core module on Strategic Integrated Management Systems (SIMS). From ethnographic data from over 100 reflective logs, diaries plus our own observational data and interviews, we have developed a multi-spiral model of learning in self-organising teams. We have also conceived a prototype beliefs box and walkback technique to enable teams to progress towards achievement of corporate vision and a changed corporate identity. Our results suggest some means to overcome dysfunctionality and anomie. These tools and techniques can also usefully be transferred to digital environments in the future.

International relationship marketing ‐ The importance of psychic distance

This conceptual paper outlines why, when working in the international as opposed to the domestic environment, the success of a relationship marketing strategy is heavily dependent on levels of psychic distance. The higher the level of psychic distance, the greater the time and effort required to develop successful business relationships. At the different stages of relationship development, different variables of psychic distance assume relatively greater levels of importance which are likely to have implications for the implementation of a relationship marketing strategy.

Internal relationship marketing: a strategy for knowledge renewal

A retail banking case study published in this journal ten years ago described a method for inviting staff involvement in customer service improvement. In this article, the author has reinterpreted the case as an archetypal example of internal marketing for generating and circulating staff knowledge through a network of voluntary internal relationships. First, a typology for making sense of conflicting concepts in the internal marketing literature is provided. Second, the author returns to the case data to suggest an integrated theoretical framework for internal marketing that links the parallel but distinctive traditions of relationship marketing and the markets‐as‐networks approach of the International Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group. Third, internal marketing is defined as a relationship development strategy for the purpose of knowledge renewal. Finally, the implications for management are examined.

Entrepreneurial Internationalisation: The Role of Distributor/Client Relationships

This paper examines the nature of SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise) international marketing strategies, using a framework developed by Merrilees and Tiessen (1999). This framework highlights two main types of marketing strategies: relationship‐driven and sales‐driven. The original study was developed using case studies of Canadian SMEs exporting to Japan whilst this current paper employs a quantitative survey of 182 SMEs. The addition of this quantitative sample enables a more analytical approach to be employed to aid our understanding of the particular nature of SME relationship marketing in an international context. Two different methodologies, factor analysis and cluster analysis are used for this purpose. Finally, the paper investigates the link between relationship activities and export performance. The paper confirms the usefulness of the Merrilees‐Tiessen classification of SME international marketing strategies, develops a new classification of SME international relationship marketing, and establishes a link between superior relationship activities and superior export performance.