Marketing is a form of communication. Just as your company must communicate to its customers the benefits of your product or service, the company itself must be able to mobilize it's workers and energize them to focus on a common goal.

Marketing To Your Own Company

As authors Slywotzky and Morrison point out in How Digital is Your Business?, internal marketing, like external marketing, is a process of changing people's thinking, attitudes, and behaviors, but directed toward your own organization's talent base - your internal customers. Unless a major change can be accomplished first in the minds of your people, it will never be accomplished in your business.

Slywotzky and Morrison address the issue of truly making a business digital, leveraging technology to do so and the necessity of buy-in from throughout the company and by its customers as well. But the same type of buy-in is necessary to launch a new initiative within a company or to launch a new company itself.

To accomplish change, a company must energize it's talent base and explain how the change will benefit them directly, as well as benefiting the company's customers.

One of the most common and frequent areas of change today is the ongoing digitalizatoin of a company. As technology overlays each company and dramatically affects its success, it is even more important for not only the CEO, but every division to be able to communicate clearly and explicitly with each other and with the technologists, the programmers and IT people who will bring their visions into digital reality. Both sides need to work together on communicating common goals, special departmental concerns and challenges, sharing information and working together to decide how technology can best free them up and leverage their talents, improve the customer experience, and contribute to the bottom line.

Invest Resources to Communicate

When one considers the resources companies invest in R&D, developing new products, marketing, brand building, recruiting, and preparing presentations for Wall Street analysts, it becomes clear that effective communication is a central tool of a successful business. The same degree of investment of energy, resources, thought, and gathering of feedback should be devoted to the process of internal marketing, making certain the entire team is on board, and on the same page.

The Message And Its Delivery

Like a marketing message, the thought one is trying to convey should be honed, polished and refined until it is short, pithy and memorable. Harold Geneen, the great manager of ITT's then 250 some odd international companies in varied industries used to repeat: " Management must manage." He said it over and over until it was almost a mantra. What he meant was that a manager truly had to try to get this arms around all the relevant facts and information, then, whatever the facts were, he had to take whatever actions were necessary to carry out his company's plan and make a profit from the situation.

Anyone who ever worked for Geneen or read about him could certainly quote "Management must manage." Anyone familiar with Jack Welch of GE is familiar with the quote "Number one or number two," meaning GE must be capable of being number one or number two in a marketplace to consider entering it.

One of the reasons for refining the message until it's short is to make it memorable. This also involves a great deal of repetition. As in all successful marketing, It is impossible to repeat your core message too often. On the 100th time, someone will be hearing it for the first time and someone will be just grasping it for the first time.

Getting the Message

It is not just a question of getting the message out. It is also a matter of employees hearing the message, which, in fact, involves a process. A worker must first hear the message, then understand it, then grasp its implication for him directly, then embrace the message and become an advocate. This is a process which takes time, like the drip of water on a rock which gradually changes its shape.