Internal marketing in changing times - Supporting personnel meeting customers in physical retail stores

Abstract

Abstract NRWC 2024

Internal marketing in changing times - Supporting personnel meeting customers in physical retail stores

Ulf Johansson, Lund School of Economics and management, Center for retail studies at Lund university
Kristina Bäckström, Campus Helsingborg, Lund university, Center for retail studies at Lund university

A lot has been written about the change of retail in later years (Berman, 2019; Chun, et al, 2023; Corkery, 2017), not least the change that has come through digitalization (Hagberg & Sundström, 2016) and what that has meant for physical retail. One consequence of this has been an increasing pressure on physical retail to find competitive advantages compared to the increasing on-line retail (Vannuchi & Pantano, 2020). One potential source of this is personnel in physical retail. Previous research have found that personnel – for customers – are what makes or breaks a retail store visit (Bäckström and Johansson, 2006; 2017). We can also see that retailers are increasingly seeing this (Bäckström and Johansson, 2017) and are making strategic efforts to make the customer meeting in store to increasingly involve meetings with personnel. While this may be a natural step, there are a lot of challenges to this type of strategy. One is the type of customer personnel are meeting. The customer is often very informed and knowledgeable, not least through access to information technology (through mobile phones) when accessing stores. This increases the demands on personnel in the customer meetings. Also, while we see efforts to make customer meetings involve personnel in retail stores, we also see the opposite development, namely the development of self-service technology of different kinds (Pantano & Vannucci, 2019, Pantano & Pripras, 2016; Pantano & Priporas, 2012). These efforts can be seen as a separate strategy by retailers but it can also be seen as something that is built in to support personnel in customer meetings. All in all, strategies in retail with regard to how to manage the customer meetings in store are changing and both personal meetings and self-service technology play important roles here. In the literature this area of managing what happens in the customer facing parts of an organization, for example in customer meetings is often called internal marketing (Ballantyne, 200; Gounaris, 2007; Lings & Greenly, 2005; Söderlund, 2012). Internal marketing is seen as efforts made to enable the promises set out by external marketing (Grönroos, 2015; Normann, 2002). Often this involves efforts by central office in service organisations to make sure that customer facing parts of the organizations have the right tools and competences for what they meet when entering the customer meeting.

In the literature there is a lot of studies about customer meetings in different sections of the service industry (fx. hotels/hospitality sector, hospitals/health care, schools, airlines). However, there are few steaming from recent years meaning that parts of the digital developments that have taken place and enabled customers new competence levels have not been studied from a personnel perspective. Also, while a service-based industry (selling both products and services), there are not an abundance of studies of this sector retailing (for exceptions see Panaigyrakis & Theodoridis, 2009). This is quite strange as retail indeed is providing service and on a large scale, meeting (for the big actors) millions of customer every day in customer meetings. A study of customer meetings in the retail industry could thus provide contributions as to the understanding of customer meetings in the new age of digital conditions. Further more and relating to internal marketing, a special challenge for retail is what we call horizontal integration, that is integrating and calibrating the customer offer (and customer meeting) across – often – hundreds of outlets. While other service firms also have the challenge of calibrating the offer given by front-line personnel, retail firms are handling that on a larger scale.

The focus of this paper is the strategic change taking place in retail chains, where an increasing focus on making it possible of personnel in stores to meet customers in new ways. This involves being prepared to meet a new and more knowledgeable customer but also means supporting the personal with tools for personnel and customers (self-service technology). In focus here are both the central office perspective, making efforts to provide the conditions necessary to realize a new type of customer meetings – and the perspective of the personnel in the stores that are supposed to realize this strategy.

Empirically the setting is the Swedish retail industry and five studies at five different retail companies in different retail industries (different when it comes to the demands and the level of customer meeting).

The purpose of this paper is to analyze, with the base in internal marketing, how changing ways of working for front line personnel is supported by central efforts in retail organisation

References

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Vannucci, V & Pantano, E (2020) Digital or human touchpoints? Insights from consumer-facing in-store services. Information Technology & People Vol. 33 No. 1, 2020 pp. 296-310

• author: Johansson, Ulf and Bäckström, Kristina
• organization: Marketing; Centre for Retail Research at Lund University; Department of Service Studies
• publishing date: 2024
• type: Contribution to conference
• publication status: published
• subject: Business Administration
• conference name: Nordic Retail and Wholesale Conference
• conference location: Helsingborg, Sweden
• conference dates: 2024-11-05 - 2024-11-07
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: 80cbf538-8c99-49c2-ab85-ea98e9723274
• date added to LUP: 2025-03-31 13:25:45
• date last changed: 2025-06-23 12:36:38