Category: Accounting and Marketing
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The Destiny of Accounting Measures of Customer Assets
In an optimistic piece Keiningham, Aksoy, and Bejou outline what they think the future of customer asset management is. What should we expect for accounting measures of customer assets? How should we expect such assets to be treated in the future? Why Are Accounting Measures Of Customer Assets So Bad? They note three big problems.…
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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…
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The Politics of Accounting
Tony Tollington’s book on Brand Assets is fascinating. (Accounting rules have changed a bit since he wrote it. The acronyms and rule numbers aren’t what are used nowadays but the ideas are similar). He makes fascinating notes on the politics of accounting. The Politics Of Accounting For Intangible Assets Tollington notes the problems with the…
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Double Entry Bookkeeping
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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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…
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Catch 22 And Accounting For Employees
A theme of mine is the challenge that marketers have with financial accounting. Essentially most marketing spending is accounted for as an expense. This is even if it has the explicit intention to be an investment. This makes financial reports pretty poor for understanding the marketing of a firm. What about Human Resources (HR). We…
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The Marketing-Accounting Interface
There is a lot of work linking marketing and finance. Unfortunately, at least from my perspective, nearly all of this has focused on linking marketing to financial markets. Such work is useful but I would like more looking at more diverse linkages between marketing and accounting. Sidhu and Robert’s article is an exception. They look…
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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…
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Advertising Budgeting And Managerially Relevant Research
Academic research occasionally desires to be practical. Various journals therefore often have sections that allow for the reporting of the results of practical work with managers. The journals publish such studies even where there aren’t significant theoretical contributions. In the past the Marketing Science journal has published work under “Applications”. In this vein Doyle and…
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What Is Tobin’s Q Useful For?
I am not a fan of Tobin’s q (as it is currently used). I have a Marketing Science paper on the misuse of Tobin’s q in marketing. As such, I was fascinated to see a SSRN working paper with a very similar title in the field of finance/economics. The authors Robert Bartlett and Frank Partnoy,…
