Applying marketing concepts to enhance HR services

Using marketing techniques to implement HR services more effectively:

Nowadays, one of the main concerns of companies is to differentiate their products and services from those of competitors. From the HR point of view, the products can be considered as services offered by HR department to employees. In fact, firms can apply marketing concepts and techniques to offer distinctive services to employees. I will briefly elaborate marketing concepts and techniques that can be used by HR practitioner to achieve this objective.  

Marketing mix

Many of us are familiar with concept of “Marketing Mix”. This concept is often used to evaluate the external marketing strategy. Interestingly, Marketing Mix concept can be used by HR people to evaluate all aspects of the HR plan implementation. I will explain the 7Ps Model (Product, Price, Process, Promotion, Participants, Physical evidence, Place)  and demonstrate how they can be used to identify, evaluate and integrate HR services.

Product

Products are the HR department’s offerings. In the strategic level, product can be the corporate‘s vision or at the tactical level, competencies and attributes needed to implement the strategy can be considered as a product. Other services such as training courses or new performance measure are HR products as well. At the very fundamental level, the jobs are themselves are HR products. Designing the jobs is so important to improve employee’s motivation and productivity. Treating jobs as products can help HR people to market the product in more effective way to attract talented employees.

Price

Price refers to actual costs of implementing of the new offerings and psychological costs of adopting of the offerings (e.g. opportunity costs). The psychological costs are difficult to measure because employees may tent to overestimate the costs and resist changes.

Process

Process refers to how employees receive a product. The question is how the offerings are delivered to employees. In fact, the entire supply chain process should be examined. For example, the supplier of new policies might be government or new policies may introduce through negotiations with unions and so on.

Promotion

All the promotional activities such as incentives, magazine, advertising, face to face presentation to individuals or groups can be used to promote the offerings.

Participants

Participants refer to both those who are involved in delivering the offerings and also those receiving it. For example, employees, line managers, top managers.

Physical evidence

It refers to the environment in which the offering is delivered and also tangible goods such as memos, manuals.

Place

It refers to the channels (or third parties) that are used to get products to employees. For instance, place could mean meetings, conferences, etc. where policies are announced and also channels can refer to third parties (for example, consultants and training agencies) used to deliver the offerings.

Market research

One the most important element in implementation of HR services is to assess employees’ needs and monitor the impact of the HR policies on them.  Employee attitude surveys are the most common type of market research which date back to the 1930s, when the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in UK started using them to study labour turnover, but nowadays are used for a wide range of issues, including attitudes held on supervision, remuneration, working conditions, specific personnel practices, incentive schemes and so forth. For example, the Gallup 12 questions survey or Sear’s 10 questions survey can be used to measure the employees’ mindset. Unfortunately, the importance of market research is often underestimated by HR practitioners. It is estimated that only 10 percent of firms invest in market research.

Market segmentation

Market segmentation is a process in which the HR people group employees based on their similar characteristics, needs and wants.

Positioning

Internal positioning involves providing an appropriate mix of differentiated benefits to a specific employee segment that will motivate it to achieve effective implementation of marketing and other strategies (Ahmed & Refiq 2003, p.27).

I would suggest 2 steps to position the HR offerings:

1-    How are competitive offerings positions?

Beside, popular benchmarking ad using best practices, I would suggest to use a perceptual map or snake diagram to ease the comparison.

2-    How should our offerings be positioned?

The aforesaid market research can be used to understand what image a new offering should have in the eyes of employees and what messages will effectively support this image.