INTERNAL CUSTOMER VALUE CREATION AND COMMUNICATION CHOICES

Abstract

Understanding why organizational stakeholders choose to communicate company-relevant information to others in their network is an area of ongoing interest to both academics and practitioners. This dissertation advances internal marketing literature by conceptualizing employees as internal customers and modeling their communication behaviors as value exchanges. Communication choices were hypothesized to be based on the perceived values of available communication options, deriving influence from both employee internal characteristics and situational variations in the decision context. This framework was applied and analyzed within two contexts. The first essay examined the dynamics of internal customers’ propensity to “blow the whistle” on peer misconduct to organization higher-ups. These studies revealed that employees disclosed or withheld firm-damaging information based on the social and functional value characteristics presented in available communication options. The second essay examined the motivating factors behind front-line employees’ decisions to convey brand information to external customers. These studies showed that employees were driven by factors affecting the perceived intrinsic value of engaging in discussions about the brand topic, as well as the perceived extrinsic value of rewards expected as a result of having such customer interactions. Overall, this dissertation suggests that companies may enable the diffusion of company information by creating conditions that increase employees’ perceived value of engaging in brand communications.