AUTHOR
Backfjärd, Sara; Sundqvist, Kristin

DATE
2003-02-03

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Industrial marketing and e-commerce

SUMMARY
Nowadays there is a trend towards increased number of merging and acquisition activities, since it for many firms is the only way to stay competitive. However many of these mergers fail since a change process in an organization often is painful and many organizations do not take the ‘people’ variable into consideration. A way of easing the change and involve the employee in the integration process is to use internal marketing, which is a planned effort to overcome resistance to change and integrate employees towards the effective implementation of new organizational culture. With this as a base we developed our purpose with this thesis, which is to “gain a better understanding of how internal marketing can facilitate the integration of two merging companies when creating a new organizational culture”. In order to be able to answer the purpose we conducted two case studies, Stora Enso and AstraZeneca. The conclusions that we drawn from the study is that the integration of a new organizational culture definitely is facilitated by the use of internal marketing, our research also indicated that some of the internal marketing activities should be present in order to have an effective implementation of a new organizational culture.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--03/020--SE / NR 2003:020