It is helpful for marketers to understand accounting. The phrase double entry bookkeeping has a tendency to put people off but that is unfortunate. The idea that each event is represented by two entries is an elegant one. Marketers can learn a lot from the strengths of such an approach. Double Entry Bookkeeping Aids Understanding…
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Woke-Washing: A Big Deal?
I find the discussions of the role of social purpose in marketing fascinating. Unlike a lot of marketing discussions this can make it into popular debates. Owen Jones, a UK Guardian (left leaning) opinion journalist gave his view on brands and the culture wars. The open question — Woke-Washing: A Big Deal? LGBT Sandwich Jones…
The Role Of Budgeting In Organizations
One of the problems managers face with budgets is that budgeting has a variety of different roles. These roles can all be important but the roles sometimes conflict. Barrett and Fraser writing in the Harvard Business Review more than 40 years ago distinguished between three types of budgets: Capital (major investment planning), Financial (cash flow/bank…
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of marketing performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes. “[T]he movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance” (Clark, 1999, page 711). This raised the challenge…
What Performance Outcomes Do Marketers Use?
A question I think should be asked more in academic marketing research is “how do we define performance?” Lots of people do analysis that aims to show what creates good performance. Still, there is surprisingly little attention paid to what good performance means. What performance outcomes do marketers use? What Performance Outcomes Do Marketers Use?…
Successfully Managing At The Marketing Finance Interface
Keith Ward in his great book Marketing Finance addressees success factors in managing at the marketing finance interface. The Future Is What Matters Ward starts by noting that historical analysis can’t change the past. Okay, that is pretty obvious. The implication is important, however. Historical analysis is mostly only useful if it “can be applied to…
Classifying Marketing Investments As Expenses
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…
The Right Metric Depends Upon Its Planned Use
Sometimes I worry that marketing academics have a bit of an inferiority complex. We seem to have an aversion to anything developed in marketing. Instead, we look back to psychology (if we are consumer behavior scholars). Or we look to economics (for more quantitative scholars). This means that we often see citations to other disciplines…
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…
Public Policy And Intangibles
Haskel and Westlake in their excellent book “Capitalism without Capital” point out the problems that record keeping has with recording assets. (My last comment on this book I promise). There is a big problem in respect of public policy and intangibles. Reporting Challenges They note the asymmetry of the rules around intangible reporting. Namely that intangibles…