Internal Marketing Communication

After filtering through many of the marketing textbooks I had lying around my study, I discovered that my Marketing of Services textbook contained some fairly interesting information about internal marketing communications. The textbook by Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler (2009) describes three strategies for internal marketing communication, these include vertical communications, horizontal communications and internal branding. Each one sounds fairly simple, "Vertical communications are either downward, from management to employees, or upward, from employees to management"., "Horizontal communications are those across functional boundaries in an organisation". and internal branding, which consists of various strategies to sell the brand inside the company".


Delve into the strategies a little more and attempt to apply them to Curtin Business School (CBS), and things get complicated! CBS has many different customers but seemingly the most important being our students. The only issue with that is that a very large majority of the staff across CBS have little to no contact with students throughout their day-to-day activities and in some cases not at all throughout their working career. How does this get fixed? Good question. If you asked majority of the staff at CBS they probably wouldn't even be aware that students are most likely the number one marketing tool that we have as an organisation. When you think about this, it does make sense though. Students are the ones sitting in their chairs attending lectures, using the Abacus labs to meet up with fellow students working on assignments, using Blackboard to access the unit material and using the services offered around the campus. They are talking about these activities with their friends, family, people they talk to on the street and perhaps contacts they have overseas. As we learn in most of the units undertaken in this degree, word of mouth is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as marketers. So as this is the case, why do most staff have no contact with students to hear these stories and develop marketing strategies to market their positive experiences or counteract negative publicity?


For many different reasons, like most organisations, CBS has various departments that fall under the CBS umbrella, however in most cases they operate as completely separate organisations. These departments consist of administration, finance, strategic, support and project areas that enable each department to run as smoothly as possible whilst adhering to governance and policy guidelines. These departments are also know as schools such as Accounting, Business Law & Taxation, Economics & Finance, Graduate School of Business, Information Systems, Management and Marketing.


Reference: Zeithaml, Valarie A., Mary Jo Bitner, and Dwayne D. Gremler. 2009. Services Marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin