By: Robert F. Abbott

The senior flight attendant on the WestJet flight was starting the routine safety talk: the bit about flotation vests and emergency exits that we ignore at the beginning of every flight.

"If we could have your attention, please, we would appreciate it - in fact we'd be downright shocked," she said. The passengers and the rest of the crew laughed along with her and then, having captured our attention, she went on with her instructions.

That event, on my second flight with the airline, may have been the point when I became a fan of this airline; at the time it was an upstart, discount carrier. The flight attendant's small joke was just one of many good-spirited remarks I heard from station staff and cabin crews.

Guess what? I like travelling with people who enjoy their work. And that point is made, too, by Lance Secretan who argues in an IndustryWeek article (May 15, 2000) that employees should be treated as well as customers.

Using Southwest Airlines as his example (and WestJet modeled itself on Southwest), Secretan says management needs to put the same commitment and resources into internal marketing to employees that it puts into external marketing to customers. Hence the expression, internal customer or internal customers.

That's not an unreasonable idea, considering that companies sometimes have to fight harder to get and keep good employees than to get and keep customers. Put another way, can you serve customers well if you don't have good employees? And, don't forget that the way employees treat customers reflects the way they're treated by management.

So, if we were going to build an internal marketing program for employees, where would we start? What would we do? How would we do it?

Well, we'd probably start with internal customers the same way that we start with external customers: by finding out what they wanted. By identifying what they want and need, and how those wants and needs are being addressed.

As we articulate our reasons for marketing to internal customers (setting objectives), as we figure out the goals of employees, and identify the best medium for communicating with them, we're setting out a communication strategy.

Once we have a strategy, we can start on tactics, which outline how we will implement the strategy: what will we discuss, how often we'll discuss it, and what presentation style we'll use.

What we'll discuss depends on our subject matter; how often refers to the number of times in a specified time period that we will communicate the subject matter, and presentation style refers to the tone we'll take in sending our messages.

Once both the strategy and tactics for internal customers are in place, we act. We implement the plan. And good internal marketing, like external marketing, would involve gathering feedback afterward.

In the case of external customers, feedback is immediate and obvious; they buy or they don't buy. When we turn to internal customers, though, the feedback will be less obvious. In general, we will have set objectives based on having employees do certain things; in the feedback phase we can ask whether they did it, and how well, and how often.

To get and keep good employees, cater to them as you would to important customers, through internal marketing. Marketing to internal customers can be just as important as marketing to external customers.