Reconceptualising Internal Marketing: A Multistakeholder Perspective

Brown, David (2017) Reconceptualising Internal Marketing: A Multistakeholder Perspective. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis reconceptualises Internal Marketing (IM) through multi-stakeholder perspectives, by exploring the experiences and opinions of those directly affected by IM, whether as policy-makers, implementers and transmitters, managers or ‘recipient’ staff. By recruiting participants from many industries and levels of seniority, it complements the predominantly organisation-level, top-down perspectives within extant IM literature, emancipating the voices of previously underrepresented actors. The study is intended to address recent calls for exploration of dyadic perspectives within IM research (Yang & Coates, 2010), and assess the applicability of key concepts from Channel Management (CM) literature, transposing them from the supply chain into an internal market context. It therefore explores the tacit, informal, unplanned, undocumented and often interpersonal transactions through which IM takes place, and may be considered relativistic, phenomenological and postmodernist in its concerns. An emergent concept is the phenomenon of Internal Demarketing (ID), in which accepted marketing strategies and techniques applied to the internal market reduce the attractiveness of the organisation to some or all staff. It is proposed that this may occur as an intentional, covert strategy, possibly with sub-strategies tailored to different organisational objectives and employee segments. These are taxonomized here.This qualitative thesis makes a methodological contribution by introducing a new form of member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) in which participants prepare for interview by reflecting upon their own online and digital communications about the research topic, using that reflexivity to steer interviews and corroborate or challenge and amend the researcher’s subsequent analysis of those interviews

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