Papers in finance can sometimes get a hefty citation count boost when they get picked up in marketing. Peters and Taylor‘s 2017 paper on Total q is a nice paper. They make the very reasonable assertion that their Total q measures investment opportunities better than current Tobin’s q approximations. While I’m not a finance person…
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Total Q, A New Improved Tobin’s Q? Not By Much
Total q is a new variant on Tobin’s q. Possibly my best-known academic paper is a piece with Moeen Butt that was published in Marketing Science. This paper criticized the use of Tobin’s q as a performance metric in marketing. I am not the only person who has concerns about the use of Tobin’s q…
Marketing Accounts: A Better Way To Measure Marketing Performance
You don’t have to be in marketing long to realize that the way financial accounting treats it doesn’t inspire much confidence. This is a topic I have noted a number of times in my blog, for example here, here and here. For this problem we have a solution, Marketing Accounts. Read Our Marketing Accounts Paper…
Profit Measurement: Choose Your Own Level Is Problematic
What could be more central to business than profits? For-profit businesses have a goal to make profits by definition. As such, you might think that we all had a pretty good shared idea of what profit is. Of course, you would be wrong. Profit measurement is surprising open to interpretation. You can often choose your…
Brand Valuation: Progress But Lots More Needed
Brand valuation is a challenging subject. There isn’t a single formula I can give but it is an extremely important topic for marketers to understand. Hence it gets its own popular marketing metrics page. Brand Matters Brands clearly matter in marketing. There are any number of marketing sites that will explain this. Indeed, that is…
Tobin’s Q: Why Academics Should Listen To Managers
Has A Manager Ever Used Tobin’s Q? Ask an academic where they know Neil Bendle from and they might cite my work arguing that Accounting-based Approximations of Tobin’s q (AATQ) should never be used as a performance metric. (I don’t mean to imply that I think that I’m properly famous in the sense that normal…
What Can The Marketing-Finance Interface Tell Us About Witchcraft Trials?
Edeling, Srinivasan, and Hanssens have a useful new review paper on the Marketing-Finance Interface. The Value Of Review Papers Review papers, such as this, play a vital role in helping frame the field. They give Ph.D. students a way to get up to speed on prior contributions. Review papers also give more seasoned academics a…
Non-GAAP Disclosures and Implications for Marketing
An interesting phenomenon has emerged over recent years in financial accounting which could prove relevant to marketing. This is non-GAAP reporting by companies. What is, could be, the relatonshp between marketing and Non-GAAP disclosures. GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles The rules of external financial reporting, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, are known as GAAP. Non-GAAP reporting…
Understanding What Companies Are Spending On Marketing. SG&A Isn’t Great.
I often discuss marketing assets. Specifically, I worry about that the way marketing assets are accounted for in financial reports. This does not help us understand marketing effectiveness. For example, see here and here and here. This results of financial accounting choices creat a significant problem in understanding what marketing does. It means we can’t…
The Problem Of Goodwill And Marketing
Tony Tollington’s book on Brand Assets is fascinating. The book is not an especially easy read. Indeed, it gets into some pretty detailed philosophical debates around the nature of assets and accounting which can be tough. That said it is good to think about these things and Tollington definitely made me think. There is a…