Accounting and Marketing Archive
With Xin Wang I have recently published a piece which we called Marketing Accounts. I’m pleased to say that the full text of this research article is available free of charge at the link below (thanks to SSHRC/the Canadian government). …
I think that there is a desperate need for marketers to understand accounting. (Indeed, I think a lot of marketing research in the area of Marketing and Finance gets into problems through lack of accounting knowledge). The reverse is almost certainly …
Baruch Lev and Feng Gu, accounting professors, ask a simple question. “Why are managers and auditors so blasé about accounting for intangibles?” (Lev and Gu, 2016, page 90). The way intangibles are accounted for clearer violates the concept of matching. This concept …
Marketing has an accountability problem. This is widely accepted even by marketers. Marketers argue that their actions are vital to their organization’s success but often the proof offered ends up being: “trust me, we need to do this”. It isn’t hard to see why …
In 2000 Peter Doyle started the abstract of his paper, Value-based Marketing with the sentence. “Marketing has not had the impact on the boardroom that its importance justifies” (Doyle, 2000, page 299.) Doyle made a fair point. It is very common …
Clarity is important to effective language use. If our words all mean different things it is hard to communicate. It is often surprising that marketers, who often claim to be communication experts, are often terribly imprecise about what they mean. …
Preparing for class recently I came across a media report which illustrates the confusion and sloppiness that surrounds marketing metrics. An important question is the bottom line impact of social media. How can you persuade the CFO to fund social …
Marketers, and business people more broadly, often use accounting profit to measure success. This isn’t too surprising; often firms claim to be profit maximizing so anything labelled as profit sounds like something that should be maximized. The problem is that …
Marketing is too often seen as an expense. The money spent on marketing isn’t expected to deliver any long terms benefits by this logic. It is not very surprising that something that is treated as an expense is under pressure …
Pfeffer and Sutton’s (2000) book chapter starts a bit too negatively for my liking. The title sets the wrong tone: “When Measurement Obstructs Good Judgement”. To be fair their point isn’t that measurement is bad. They really mean that bad …
