The impact of internal marketing activities on external marketing outcomes

Abstract

An increasingly service-oriented economy requires organizations to attract and retain customers to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage. To achieve this objective, organizations must focus their efforts on developing and sustaining an organizational culture that emphasizes internal customer well-being as a means to attract and retain external customer patronage. This rationale is based on the notion that to the external customer, the internal customer represents the firm. In fact, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that there is a direct relationship between a firm's financial success and its commitment to internal marketing practices that treat employees as assets. However, there is a paucity of theoretical frameworks that explore these relationships in a systemic fashion. Based on the literature in marketing and human resource (HR) management, we propose a model that relates six key internal marketing practices to external customer satisfaction and loyalty, mediated by internal customer attitudes (i.e., loyalty to the firm, job satisfaction, trust in management) leading to extra role behaviors directed at external customers.