دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بازاریابی داخلی، رفتارهای مشتری مدار و پاسخ های رفتاری مشتری - وایلی 2018

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the effect of internal marketing—treating employees as internal customers—on salesperson's engagement in customer-oriented behaviors and resultant customers’ responses. The data were collected from dyadic interactions between salespeople and customers in banking firms in Vietnam. The results showed that internal marketing is significantly associated with salesperson's performance of adaptive selling behavior, customer-oriented selling behavior, and relational selling behavior, which result in customer relationship continuity, purchase intention, and positive word-of-mouth. In addition, salesperson's customer-oriented behaviors play partial mediating roles between internal marketing and external customer responses. The study extends the extant literature of internal marketing and offers useful managerial implications for service firms, particularly banking firms in Vietnam. The study concludes with suggestions of potential research directions for future studies.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The study has four limitations. First, as a cross-sectional study, it is restricted from inference of causality of the relationships. Future studies are encouraged to conduct longitudinal approach. Second, since our sample only involved banking firms in Hanoi, Vietnam, the results cannot be generalized to organizations in other industries. This is due to the varied degrees of competition per industries (Nguyen, & Papadopoulos, 2011), which may affect organizations’ investment in internal marketing practices. Neither can the study's findings be generalized to Western economies, the cultures of which are characterized as individualism and low power distance, apart from Vietnamese cultures with high collectivism and high power distance (Wang, & Yi, 2011). We suggest future research attempt a replication of our study using larger samples. We also recommend that researchers design cross-cultural studies to gain a comparative insight of the validity of the proposed model. This is because internal marketing effects in different cultures may vary (Awward, & Agti, 2011). Third, while our study's title addresses customer behavioral responses, which is rather large in scope, we merely pursued three behavioral outcomes. Future research may expand our study's design with additional behavioral outcomes like customer citizenship behaviors. Finally, while customers may produce both positive and negative WOM (Buttle, 1997), and organizations need to make efforts in managing both of them, our study deals with only positive WOM. We suggest that future studies either specifically attend to negative WOM or group certain negative customer behaviors including negative WOM and switching behaviors to study in relation to internal marketing.