Stronger Integration Between Management Accounting and Marketing

The call for a stronger integration between management accounting and marketing is a relatively new phenomenon. In recent years, some Authors have started to face the topic of the interface of management accounting and marketing with reference both to the management accounting and to the marketing literature (Glaves et al. 2007, Wilson and Gilligan 2005, Roslender and Hart 2003, Roslender and Hart 2002). The implicit acknowledgment of the importance of specialized information provided by management accounting systems (MAS) is strictly linked to these systems’ nature and aims.

The aim of MAS is to provide information able to assist decision making processes of key figures within the organization (Abernethy and Bouwens 2000, Arnold and Hope 1983). For this reason, MAS must be able to provide information tailored to the specific information needs of each user if they want to accomplish their primary role (Atkinson et al. 2007). This entails a never ending process of adaptation and change of MAS on the base of changes of market conditions and of the associated information needs (Hopwood 1987). In light of these considerations, it’s relatively easy to understand the reason why, in recent years, the interface of management accounting and marketing has attracted scholars’ attention.

Marketing is the answer to the considerable changes that markets have faced since ’70. Its development has led to new information needs and new key figures in the organizational structures of many organizations. The shift from an approach “production oriented” to a “marketing oriented” one (Kotler 2006) is the proof of new critical variables, not really taken into consideration before. The considerable attention paid to the relations with single clusters of...

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...of a shifting of critical information from an “internal orientation” to an “external orientation”. Kaplan and Jhonson in 1987 already underlined the inadequacy of traditional cost accounting systems; they asserted that cost accounting systems were too focused on the provision of information internally oriented and, in particular, “production oriented”, stressing the call for a change towards broader and long term information. The consideration of marketing costs and their relevance is clear when the Authors suggest to contemplate their impact for determining a more realistic production costs. But, also in this case, the provision of MAS for the marketing area is not explicitly taken into consideration, because this was not the aim of the Authors. Their intent was to put in light some limits of traditional cost accounting systems driven by changes of market contexts.