Internal Marketing: A Spreading Tool within Organizations

Internal Marketing is an important but still an under researched aspect of service marketing about customer-consciousness of frontline employees. As it is gradually getting more attention from researchers and practitioners, this study reviews the internal marketing (IM) literature throughout different industries. Papers were retrieved from all databases of ISI Web of Knowledge during years 1950-2013. Main highlighted areas in the IM topic include; health care industry (with a 48% of the retrieved records), service industry (21%), technology industry (8%), education industry (6%) and financial industry (4%). Other individual sectors (13%) have also tried to implement internal marketing schemes within their organizations. Well motivated and committed employees, with a clear vision about the service imply customers being well served. Results in the literature also show that a good internal marketing strategy depends on the affection and commitment towards the organization by their members. Hence, it’s important to understand the staffs’ needs and expectations. Recent research on internal marketing includes broader concepts as happiness in workplace and total service quality for customers. We find research gaps in this matter and provide directions for further investigation.