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Considers how recent concerns with service quality have led to increased awareness of the importance of the role of the front‐line employee, the service provider. Describes how internal marketing has been instrumental in raising service providers′ performance. Develops a method, drawing on organizational literature, for identifying segments of the service organization which can be targeted by internal marketing. Argues that the service marketer should view employees as “customers” who can be analysed using marketing techniques, thereby enabling the enhancement of service quality. Includes detailed recommendations and an appendix.

As marketers develop new marketing strategies and as marketing scholars seek a new paradigm for the field, public relations perspectives may be preferred over traditional marketing perspectives. Given that public relations has a longer history in building relationships and corporate equity — two of the cornerstones of marketing's future — a public relations perspective has the potential, first to help marketers move from a tactical to a strategic focus, secondly, to contribute substantially to marketing theory by providing depth, breadth and context to emerging concepts such as brand equity, one‐to‐one marketing and relationship marketing, and thirdly, to help more organisations discover the ‘culture‐to‐customer’ business philosophy that characterises most great marketing organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage the development of a research stream on the market orientation concept in higher education. Specifically, the author explains why this concept has emerged as a potentially relevant strategy to manage higher educational institutions. The paper raises the main problems surrounding the use of market orientation in higher education, and thereby, suggests an extensive research agenda which is expected to improve the importation of marketing concepts in higher education.

This paper is based on an extensive critical literature review on market orientation, and a document analysis to grasp the major changes that have affected higher education institutions' context since the middle of the 1980s. A bulk of research agenda is proposed and summarised in a table. The different topics are rooted in the link the author has attempted to put between marketing theory and higher educational context.

Research on market orientation in higher education still has many rooms to explore. These are: competition, quality issues, the impact of budget cuts on marketing implementation and market orientation operationalisation, etc.

While the market orientation strategy has been widely studied in commercial sector, its use in public and non‐profit sector such as higher education is still unsatisfactory. The paper: points on the limits of conceptual transpositions; discusses why market orientation is important to face the new context of higher education; and raises a number of research directions that have tremendous promises in the endeavour to build richer theories of marketing management, and to address significant problems of marketing practice in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to present the first known empirically‐tested model of Employee Based Brand Equity (EBBE). In doing so, it seeks to provide insight into how organisations can not only effectively manage the internal brand building‐process but also, more importantly, appreciate the subsequent employee effects and organisational benefits.

Data were collected via an online survey of 371 employees who work in service organisations, sourced from a market research database list.

Strong support was found for nine out of the ten hypothesised relationships, thus providing strong validation for the proposed model.

The employment of surveys can present data collection problems stemming from such things as lack of willingness to participate on behalf of the respondent, loss of validity when using structured questionnaires, and inherent challenges of wording questions properly. However, in acknowledging these limitations, actions, such as the utilisation of a national database of “opt in” survey participants coupled with the good reliability results and the methodical four‐stage survey design process undertaken, it is suggested that every effort was made to negate the limitations.

Knowledge is gained from empirically validating a model of EBBE: it further enriches the application of traditional brand management techniques; provides a framework for brand communication training; increases organisational understanding of how to engender positive employee actions; and increases the accountability of such an internal investment by identifying measurable organisational benefits that accrue as a result of such efforts.

The paper makes three important contributions: expanding the existing brand equity literature to incorporate a third yet equally relevant perspective, that being the employee; the adoption of a multi‐disciplined approach to addressing a marketing issue and, in doing so, extending beyond the connectionist cognitive psychology view of brand equity to incorporate a contextual/organisation cultural element; and reflecting the perceptions of employees, who are currently under‐represented in the internal brand management literature.

The purpose of this empirical paper is to investigate internal marketing from a behavioural perspective. The impact of internal marketing behaviours, operationalised as an internal market orientation (IMO), on employees' marketing and other in‐role behaviours (IRB) were examined.

Survey data measuring IMO, market orientation and a range of constructs relevant to the nomological network in which they are embedded were collected from the UK retail managers. These were tested to establish their psychometric properties and the conceptual model was analysed using structural equations modelling, employing a partial least squares methodology.

IMO has positive consequences for employees' market‐oriented and other IRB. These, in turn, influence marketing success.

The paper provides empirical support for the long‐held assumption that internal and external marketing are related and that organisations should balance their external focus with some attention to employees. Future research could measure the attitudes and behaviours of managers, employees and customers directly and explore the relationships between them.

Firm must ensure that they do not put the needs of their employees second to those of managers and shareholders; managers must develop their listening skills and organisations must become more responsive to the needs of their employees.

The paper contributes to the scarce body of empirical support for the role of internal marketing in services organisations. For researchers, this paper legitimises the study of internal marketing as a route to external market success; for managers, the study provides quantifiable evidence that focusing on employees' wants and needs impacts their behaviours towards the market.

This study aims to assess how innovative organizational culture and innovative leadership generate market flexibility for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector to enhance their competitiveness. Both organizational culture and leadership are seen as firm-level resources capable of influencing the flexibility of the firm in periods of market turbulence. The study argues that SME service firms must use their internal resources to develop their flexibility capability which is more valuable, rare, inimitable and not substitutable.

SME service firms from Ghana are used to test the study’s hypotheses through robust standard regression analysis. A sampling frame was developed from an online database of small and medium enterprises operating in the service sector.

The findings suggest that although organizational culture and leadership may influence a service firm’s competitiveness, it is more viable to use these firm-level resources to create market flexibility capability to amplify the effect. This means, when culture and leadership propel the flexibility drive, the service firm is able to connect, coordinate and synchronize functional units to take advantage of new product and market opportunities. Additionally, market flexibility emanating from organizational culture and leadership wields enough power and resource support to tackle the turbulent market conditions better than firms with less support.

The managerial implication from this study is that firms should use their organizational culture and leadership to create flexible organizations that afford them the opportunity to adapt to the environmental dynamics. If both leadership and culture work together, they are able to create strong market capabilities such as flexibility which determines how well the firm will respond to the competition, customer demand and all other external pressures. It is, therefore, the view of this paper that SMEs should use their organizational culture and leadership to build a market-flexible organization to create a competitive advantage.

This paper shows how internal resources/assets such as culture and leadership generate the needed flexibility to create a competitive advantage for SMEs. This paper explains the two dimensions of Volberda’s flexibility from a firm-level resource perspective and highlights flexibility as a second-order capability whose cultivation and effectiveness are dependent on a firm’s culture and leadership. Evidence of how a firm’s market flexibility is fuelled by organizational leadership and culture is demonstrated. Finally, this paper shows how resource-poor SMEs in emerging African economies can enhance their market competitiveness through internal systems and processes.

The majority of research pertaining to internal marketing (IM) is conceptual and still remains so even at present. The lack of widely accepted definitions of the IM concept and a relevant valid measure has lead to increased attempts by academia to investigate the relative concepts and measures. The purpose of this paper is to examine a synthesis of IM and investigates its effect on business performance in a retail context.

The context of this paper is within supermarket chains in Greece with nation wide coverage. A survey is designed and implemented using the branch managers.

SEM analysis indicates five dimensions of the IM construct: formal interaction, reward systems, feedback, internal procedures and policies and internal customer orientation (ICO). Retailers seem to adopt in an embryonic stage a concept of IM. IM indeed has a positive effect on business performance.

Single key informant, single context of the paper are considerations when examining research limitations.

The embryonic stage of adopting and implementing IM within supermarket chains illustrates a certain manner of managing the internal customer; centralisation of procedures and tactics. Even if the concept of IM is partially exploited, the respective organisational behaviours clearly have a positive impact on both financial and non‐financial aspects of retail performance, thus revealing their importance.

This paper contributes to the rare empirical investigation of the IM notion in the firm and provides evidence on both its synthesis and its impact on business performance. The authors synthesize the concepts of internal market and ICOs providing a new approach to IM. Construct and research propositions have been axiomatic and in an only conceptual context until recently.

The purpose of this study is to collect data that allows researchers to capture both affective and cognitive buy-in influenced by both product and product strategy targets.

Analysis of 13 salesperson interviews followed the cluster and axial coding of grounded theory interview protocol.

This study finds two types of buy-in that are uniquely contingent on the target, and for which are influenced by both cognitive and affective states of being. Additionally, it finds that either affective or cognitive states of being can both drive and inhibit salesperson buy-in of either target. While the targets of buy-in appear to be mutually exclusive, the cognitive nature of disconfirming evidence appears to directly inhibit both targets of buy-in while also resulting in negative affect.

Further study that uncovers the causal role of an affective state inhibiting buy-in after the introduction of disconfirming evidence is warranted.

Managerial training and messaging approaches for achieving the two buy-in targets will likely differ or focus on only one type for efficient training.

This study is the first to examine the simultaneous effects of the two underlying states of cognition and affect on buy-in development. It is found that the two states can influence each other to stunt buy-in. The present study contributes to sales behavior literature by allowing the possibility of a sequence of states that stunt buy-in, positioning simultaneous examination is vital to the conceptualization of buy-in.

This paper presents a framework for understanding and analyzing the productivity of service workers. Based on findings in the multidisciplinary literature, it provides a working model for services managers that: recognizes that the definition of productivity may vary across service jobs, acknowledges that there are different levers for maximizing productivity in different contexts, and indicates that managing productivity needs to be viewed as a task for marketing, not just the organization's internal functions. The purview and implications of each component of the framework are discussed, together with some marketing‐based suggestions for productivity improvement.

Examines how small firms can maximise service quality to determine a competitive marketing advantage for their enterprise. Demonstrates how there is little in the conventional service quality literature to guide the small firm and that current models of service quality are most relevant to larger organisations. From the results of a two‐stage empirical study which focused on small engineering firms, a model of service quality is put forward which more truly reflects the circumstances of the smaller enterprise. Finally, the paper outlines the main considerations for the enterprise owner in developing a competitive advantage through service quality management.