The Impact of Internal Marketing on the Market Orientation of Brazilian Companies

The internal marketing concept refers to visualizing employees as internal consumers and emphasizes the need to listen to and satisfy employees as a requisite to satisfying company customers. This paper focuses, then, on the influence of internal marketing on the adoption of a corporate culture oriented to customers; i.e., a marketing orientation. Based on operationalization of the internal marketing concept from Lings and Greenley (2005), we propose a conceptual model for connections between the internal market orientation and market orientation concepts. The results of an empirical study based on a questionnaire applied to 109 Brazilian firms from several economic sectors corroborate the proposed model. The adoption of internal market oriented behavior, particularly the dimensions relative to the dissemination of information and implementation of responses, influences external market orientation and its dimensions (information production, information disclosure and response).