The Marketing / Accounting Interface

When marketing managers and financial managers join forces within any business, the result can often be poor communication on financial criteria and goals. The risk of this situation occurring is inevitably present when those with different professional backgrounds and roles are working in accordance with their own norms. In his seminal 1956 paper on general systems theory, the economist Kenneth Boulding referred to the phenomenon of "specialised ears and generalised deafness", which can be seen to exist when marketing managers are financially illiterate or when financial managers lack the necessary insights to design, implement and operate accounting systems which are useful to marketing managers in carrying out their roles. It is increasingly difficult to attach credence to the idea of marketing managers who lack financial skills, or financial managers who fail to relate to the context in which marketing managers operate. Understanding the marketing/accounting interface is therefore important in generating emergent properties from the interaction of marketers and accountants whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The chapters in this volume seek to address this challenge. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The marketing / accounting interface Robin Roslender & Richard M.S. Wilson 2. The marketing accounting interface – lessons and limitations Baljit K. Sidhu & John H. Roberts 3. Exploring accounting and market orientation: an interfunctional case study Robert M. Inglis 4. The recognition and measurement of brand assets: an exploration of the accounting/marketing interface Nevine El-Tawy & Tony Tollington 5. Assessing marketing performance: don't settle for a silver metric Tim Ambler & John H. Roberts 6. Marketing/accounting synergy: a discussion of its potential and evidence in e-business planning Paul Phillips & Sue Vaux Halliday 7. Exploring the potential of customer accounting: a synthesis of the accounting and marketing literatures Lisa McManus & Chris Guilding 8. Examining the theoretical influences of customer valuation metrics Kenneth Weir 9. Accounting is from Mars, marketing is from Venus: establishing common ground for the concept of customer profitability Robin Gleaves, Jamie Burton, Jan Kitshoff, Ken Bates & Mark Whittington 10. Determining the indirect value of a customer Lynette Ryals 11. The marketing / accounting synergy: a final word but certainly not the last word Robin Roslender & Richard M.S. Wilson