Where is the marketing in internal marketing? Revisiting the concept from the Service-Dominant Logic perspective

For the past 25 years, scholars and practitioners have claimed that Internal Marketing (IM) is a key to business success. However, a review of the extant literature reveals that scholarship has focused on what is needed for IM to be beneficial, rather than the how IM contributes to a firm’s success or ongoing competitive advantage. To date, little is still known about the mechanisms through which IM works or could be leveraged to deliver value to the firm, leaving the research agenda described by Ahmed and Rafiq in 2003 unfulfilled more than a decade on. To address this, we propose that IM can be viewed through the lens of Service Dominant Logic to address and put forward a revised concept of IM, anchored in co-creation theory. Finally, we identify a future research agenda that examines the role of the employee as an operant resource in the co-creation of value.