Internal Marketing
Holistic marketing incorporates internal marketing, ensuring that everyone in the organization embraces appropriate marketing principles, especially senior management. Internal marketing is the task of hiring, training, and motivating able employees who want to serve customers well. Smart marketers recognize that marketing activities within the company can be as important as, or even more so than, marketing activities directed outside the company. It makes no sense to promise excellent service before the company's staff is ready to provide it. Internal marketing must take place on two levels. At one level, the various marketing functions-sales force, advertising, customer service, product management, marketing research-must work together. Too often, the sales force thinks product managers set prices or sale quotas "too high"; or the advertising director and a brand manager cannot agree on an advertising campaign. All these marketing functions must be coordinated from the customer's point of view. The following example highlights the coordination problem: The marketing vice president of a major European airline wants to increase the airline's traffic share. His strategy is to build up customer satisfaction through providing better food, cleaner cabins, better-trained cabin crews, and lower fares; yet he has no authority in these matters. The catering department chooses food that keeps food costs down; the maintenance department uses cleaning services that keep down cleaning costs; the human resources department hires people without regard to whether they are naturally friendly; the finance department sets the fares.

Because these departments generally take a cost or production point of view, the vice president of marketing is stymied in creating an integrated marketing mix.
At another level, marketing must be embraced by the other departments; they must also "think customer." Marketing is not a department so much as a company orientation.
Marketing thinking must be pervasive throughout the company. Xerox goes so far as to include in every job description an explanation of how that job affects the customer.
Xerox factory managers know that visits to the factory can help sell a potential customer if the factory is clean and efficient. Xerox accountants know that customer attitudes are affected by Xerox's billing accuracy and promptness in returning calls.

Social Responsibility Marketing
Holistic marketing incorporates social responsibility marketing and understanding broader concerns and the ethical, environmental, legal, and social context of marketing activities and programs. The cause and effects of marketing clearly extend beyond the company and the consumer to society as a whole. Social responsibility also requires that marketers carefully consider the role that they are playing and could play in terms of social welfare.
Are companies that do an excellent job of satisfying consumer wants necessarily acting in the best long-run interests of consumers and society? Consider the following criticism:
The fast-food hamburger industry offers tasty but unhealthy food. The hamburgers have a high fat content, and the restaurants promote fries and pies, two products high in starch and fat. The products are wrapped in convenient packaging, which leads to much waste; In satisfying consumer wants, these restaurants may be hurting consumer health and causing environmental problems.
Recognizing these criticisms, companies like McDonald's have added healthier items to their menus (e.g., salads) and introduced environmental initiatives (e.g., replacing polystyrene foam sandwich clamshells with paper wraps and lightweight recycled boxes).
Recently, McDonald's announced its largest environmental initiative to date. McDonald's
Corp., which buys 2.5 billion pounds of poultry, beef, and pork a year for its 30,000 restaurants worldwide, ordered its suppliers to eliminate the use of antibiotics that are also given to humans, specifically when those drugs are used to make chickens, pigs and, less often, cattle, grow faster." We saw l ots of evidence that showed the declining rate of effectiveness of antibiotics in human medicine," said Bob Langert, McDonald's senior director of social responsibility. "We started to look at what we could do."

Situations like this one call for a new term that enlarges the marketing concept. Among those suggested are "humanistic marketing" and "ecological marketing." We propose calling it the "societal marketing concept." The societal marketing concept holds that the organization's task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer's and the society's well-being.
The societal marketing concept calls upon marketers to build social and ethical considerations into their marketing practices. They must balance and juggle the often conflicting criteria of company profits, consumer want satisfaction, and public interest.

Yet a number of companies-including the Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, and Patagonia have achieved notable sales and profit gains by adopting and practicing a form of the societal marketing concept called cause-related marketing. Pringle and Thompson define this as activity by which a company with an image, product, or service to market builds a relationship or partnership with a "cause," or a number of "causes," for mutual benefit.”
Companies see cause-related marketing as an opportunity to enhance their corporate reputation, raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, build sales, and increase press coverage. They believe that customers will increasingly look for signs of good corporate citizenship that go beyond supplying rational and emotional benefits. Avon has been one of the most successful cause marketers.

The Avon Walk for Breast Cancer
The Avon Walk for Breast Cancer is one of many projects of the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Crusade, a global initiative of Avon Products, Inc., that was launched in the United States in 1993. Its mission has been to support access to care and finding a cure for breast cancer, with a focus on those who are medically underserved, by funding education, screening and diagnosis, treatment, support services, and scientific research. Worldwide, Avon is the largest corporate supporter of the breast cancer cause, with more than $250 million generated since the first program in 1992. The Avon Breast Cancer Crusade raises funds to accomplish this mission through many programs: sales of special Crusade "pink ribbon" products by Avon's nearly 600,000 U.S. independent sales representatives; concerts, walks, races, and other special events around the world; direct online fund-raising; and the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer series of weekend events in the United States.