The Influence of Managerial Accounting Techniques on Marketing Decision-making Processes

Abstract

Every firm’s management process requires useful accounting information to support planning, control, operations, and decision-making. Executives must have accounting information to guide management in achieving organizational goals. Especially in the era of rapid technological change, the digital information era affects every organization’s ability to adapt to keep up with the competition. All management disciplines, including managerial accounting, are developing good techniques to map such processes and to calibrate such maps. The management accounting discipline has broadened its focus beyond the traditional financial domain, now also including marketing and operational management issues. However, the use of ideas and concepts from other disciplines might be insufficient in internalizing a multi-disciplinary approach to business problems. Currently the connection between management accounting and marketing management could be characterized rather as a living-apart-together arrangement than as a full-fletched cooperation. The existence of some form of link between recent management accounting developments and the strategy literature has, unfortunately, given rise to an unhelpful lack of terminological and conceptual clarity. Therefore, although during the last decades clear progress has been made in strengthening the interface between management accounting and marketing management, there is still much room for further improvement. The principal purpose of this paper is to bring the above conceptualization of management accounting to the attention of a broader audience. It also offers a critique of influential contributions to the strategy/management accounting literature and traces the evolution to date of the management accounting concept. Based on the scope of their mutual relationship, this paper contributes to the growing literature by focusing on the connections between two disciplines and reflects the benefits of applying management accounting techniques for marketing decision-making processes.