Revising quality awareness through internal marketing : An exploratory study among French and English medium-sized enterprises

Internal marketing (IM) is emerging as a central theme of increasing importance in both academic and practitioner discourse. Traditionally, marketing and management have tended to focus on external customers and markets, with an emphasis upon attracting and retaining customers at a profit (Drucker, 1963; Gremler et al., 1994). IM has evolved in a bid to reshape and stimulate corporate effectiveness and raise service quality levels in organizations.
It implies the need for management to view the organization as a market, where there exists an internal supply chain consisting of internal suppliers and customers (Berry, 1984; Flipo, 1986; Foreman & Money, 1995). This would suggest that by satisfying the needs of internal customers, an organization should be in a better position to deliver the service quality desired to satisfy external customers.
The paper acknowledges the IM and service quality literature and reports on the findings of an exploratory research study of medium-sized enterprises (MSEs) in the UK and France. Whilst many public/private sector institutions have primarily targeted large multinational enterprises or small firms for their research focus, the MSE exists as an attractive (yet neglected) research entity.
The paper reports the findings of an exploratory study which is part of a research programme designed to investigate the importance and significance of IM as a mechanism to promote quality within the MSE. Current literature tends to under-emphasize firm size as a factor of IM and total quality management (TQM). It is believed that by examining this area in the context of the MSE our findings will extend the existing literature.