1.1 Necessity of integrated marketing
Marketing activities involve not just one department in an organization but the entire organization. For marketing functions to work properly, various departments within the organization must cooperate with one another in providing value to its customers.1 Beckham (1992) argues that not only the marketing department but all other departments within an organization should be responsible for marketing:
Marketers who don’t learn the language of quality improvement, manufacturing, and operations will become as obsolete as buggy whips. The days of functional marketing are gone. We can no longer afford to think of ourselves as market researchers, advertising people, direct marketers, strategists – we have to think of ourselves as customer satisfiers – customer advocates focused on whole processes.
(p. 3)
The main point here is that integrated marketing should be conducted by an organization as a whole. This proposition is not difficult to understand, but in reality, marketing activities are probably not conducted in this way at most firms because they each must contend with numerous practical issues. Different departments have different interests. They also differ in many respects, including their attitudes and approaches toward work and the characteristics of their employees. Many problems related to coordination can consequently arise, as demonstrated in the following example:
The marketing vice president of a major European airline wants to increase the airline’s traffic share. His strategy is to build up customer satisfaction through providing better food, cleaner cabins, better-trained cabin crews, and lower fares. Yet he has no authority in these matters. The catering department chooses food that keeps down food cost; the maintenance department uses cleaning services that keep down cleaning costs; the human resources department hires people without regard to whether they are naturally friendly; the finance department sets the fares. Because these departments generally take a cost or production point of view, the vice president of marketing is stymied in creating an integrated marketing mix.
(Kotler 2000, p. 22)
Three conditions are considered necessary for realizing integrated marketing: (1) integration of various functions of the marketing department, (2) marketing-oriented approaches taken by non-marketing departments, and (3) a good cooperative relationship between the marketing department and other departments.
Once the marketing department has grown to a certain size, it starts to perform several horizontal functions. Then there may be cases where conflict arises between a brand manager and an advertising manager in regard to the details of a promotional campaign – for example, in media planning. Also, disputes are not uncommon between a product development manager and a sales manager over the launch timing or pricing of a planned new product.
An important goal of internal marketing is to convince non-marketing departments into taking marketing-oriented approaches and to coordinate organization-wide integration. As for the relationship between internal marketing and external marketing (i.e., “marketing” in the general sense), internal marketing is a prerequisite for effective implementation of external marketing in the market.
In internal marketing, the term “direct customers” refers not to the end consumers who purchase products or services from one’s firm, but to the firm’s employees whose work involves providing a high level of value and satisfaction to the end customers. The idea is that not only sales and marketing personnel who come into contact with end consumers and product distributors in their daily work but also various other employees act as internal customers. Moreover, as discussed later, the idea forming the basis of internal marketing is th...
