For this week and next I will look at an excellent book – Marketing Finance – by Keith Ward. He has taught at Cranfield amongst other places. (There are later editions with new co-authors — but reading different editions of the same book too close to each other is a bit too much even for…
Category: Accounting and Marketing
Faulty Sums and Accounting
I enjoy a good polemic and Keron Bhattacharya’s book on Accountancy is certainly that. A generation old now but many of the points remain. (Although the acronyms for the UK accounting standards and accounting bodies have all changed). As an accountant himself (member of CIMA) he isn’t very happy with the way accountants were doing…
Proving The Value Of Marketing
Over the next couple of weeks I will consider ideas from a paper coming out in Marketing Science. [This post was written in 2018]. I wrote the paper with a former PhD student, Moeen Butt. This looks at the use of a metric called Tobin’s q. This has been used in papers claiming to be…
More On Accounting’s Failure To Deal With Intangibles
Accounting’s failure to deal with intangibles is a major problem in business. Marketers, and others, need to engage with financial accountants to find a better way. Problems in accounting statements Feng Gu and Baruch Lev give more details on the problems with financial accounting in their recent piece for the Financial Analysts Journal. They argue…
Measuring A Technological Revolution
Some have begun to make the argument that there is a technological revolution. A move towards intangible assets. How does one go about measuring a technological revolution? A Problem With Accounting Corrado and Hulten highlight a major problem in the way accounts are created. This applies to both corporate and national accounts. A basic idea…
Not Real Is Not The Same As Hard To Measure
Haskel and Westlake’s new book, Capitalism without Capital, is on my reading list for the new year. For now I’ll just concentrate on comments made in The Economists’ review of the book. The key point I want to make is that not real is not the same as hard to measure Intangible Assets Are On…
A Sustainable Standard When Accounting For Marketing
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) seems to have been remarkably successful. They have recruited some well-known board members. These have included Michael Bloomberg, Mary Schapiro (former SEC chair), and Laura Tyson (former London Business School Dean). This has helped them raise their profile. They have been working on a sustainable standard when accounting for…
Marketing And Finance Working Together
Charlotte Rogers has a fascinating practitioner article on the Marketing/Finance interface published in Marketing Week. This is a positive piece. It outlines how marketing and finance groups are collaborating more. Much of the advice is sensible. For example, UKTV brought a finance person into the media review team. This meant the person was able to…
A (Very Badly Done) Illustration Of Accounting For Marketing
I am not an artist in any way. Given this I’m not an ideal person to illustrate ideas. That said, I wanted to quickly (sadly not as quickly as it looks) get across the message that accountants really aren’t doing enough on the reporting of marketing assets. Considering how financial accountants report on marketing assets…
Creating Discussions Between Marketers And Accountants
In a piece for my accounting body (ACCA) I discuss the problem of what to do in respect of brands on the balance sheet. My intention is to help foster a dialogue between (financial) accountants and marketers. I am all about creating discussions between marketers and accountants. A lot of this website speaks to that….
