Perception of Future Marketers and Accountants Towards the Need for Marketing of Public Accounting Services

The law requires public companies to be audited, whereas auditing is optional for other types of business organizations. The paper sets out to ascertain whether marketing may be considered relevant to external auditors. The main purpose of the study is to present preliminary assessments on whether future marketers and accountants think marketing might be considered a necessity or redundant for public accounting firms. The study uses pairs of scaled question and open-ended components as instrument to solicit the opinions of two cohorts of university students associated with the two disciplines. The first cohort comprises third year and graduating students who have studied at least a course in marketing whereas the second cohort consists of relatively junior students. The questionnaires were given to the first cohort outside the class, whereas to the second cohort in class. After careful screening, only 56 out of 104 questionnaires collected were found usable. The open-ended responses of the respondents were content analyzed by the authors independently and the resulting classifications discussed to reach consensus. While the prospective marketers and auditors thought that promotion is important to audit firms, their reputation and service quality supersede the former in importance.