Internal Marketing

Internal Marketing

Subject: Business    / Marketing
Question

Question:

Please answer with minimum of 200 words or more for EACH QUESTION.

One reference for each question is helpful but not required.

These are discussion questions, so please answer accurately to the question being posed. Free discussion with thoughts. You can input your own idea and example.

Question #1

Sometimes the hardest thing for some marketers is to say “You are not my customer”. In reality though, you are trained as a marketer to segment, segment, segment, and target. So, your best decisions are driven around who your customers are, thus defining who your customer is not. This is much more clear in B2B marketing, versus B2C marketing. At some point, a customer originally targeted may not be profitable to serve.

Thoughts?

Questions#2

Internal Marketing

“Internal marketing” involves a variety of actions, but basically is a process of reinforcing the focus on the customer, communicating with staff so they understand their role in delivering value to the customer, developing staff so that they are effectively representing the firm in way to support the market positioning strategy, and educates the employees on “what is coming up” in marketing efforts and how they need to support those efforts. A firm’s people, in many cases and especially in service industries, are the brand. Internal marketing involves both the research aspect (gathering input from one’s own employees), as well as including them in the product roll-out process, and also being brand evangelists in the marketplace.

How good of a job of internal marketing does your firm do, or another firm that you are familiar with? What makes it work so well?

Question#3

Ethics Scenario

Florida’s Department of Citrus and a coalition of consumer groups have launched an attack on your company for “deceptive marketing” because your company markets its “SunShine” drink as fruit juice, even though the drink contains less than five percent fruit juice. Marketing “SunShine” drink as a fruit juice leads parents to believe that they are purchasing a healthy juice for their children.

What ethical and moral issues are involved in this situation?
Should these issues impact the marketing of “SunShine” drink? Why or why not?

Question#4

It is important to keep in perspective that as one learns more about the role, responsibilities and objectives of marketing that the various components should be approached from an integrated view. One component should not be viewed in a vacuum onto itself, but in relation to what the instructor calls the “complete customer and the complete solution” (Ricco, 2006).

As Kotler and Keller (2006) stated:

A whole set of forces that appeared in the last decade call for new marketing and business practices. The holistic marketing concept is based on the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognizes their breadth and inter-dependencies. Holistic marketing recognizes that everything matters with marketing. Four components of holistic marketing are relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and social responsibility marketing (Kotler& Keller, 2006, p. 16-17).

Like “action and reaction” in the discipline of physics, there is an inter-relationship in marketing variables that is dynamically oriented.

Thoughts?