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

Abstract

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 The law requires public companies to be audited, whereas auditing is optional for other type of business organizations.The paper set out to ascertain whether marketing may be considered relevant to external auditors.The main purpose of this 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 questions and open-ended components as instrument to solicit the opinions of two cohorts of university students associated with two disciplines. The first cohort comprise thirs 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 first cohort outside the class, hereas 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 resulting classifications discussed to reachconsensus. While the prospective marketers and auditors thought that promotion is important to audit firms, their reputation and service quality supersede the former in importance.