Theoretical and Empirical Research of Accounting Measures for Markets, Products and Customers : Revenue Drivers and Cost Drivers related to Products Development, Marketing and Logistics

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To ensure their survival in this age of mega-competition, corporations have been putting a great deal of effort into R & D and marketing. Nevertheless, there has been significant delay in developing management accounting infromationrelated to R & D and marketing.By focusing mainly on production, control methods designed to reduce cost have been developed. Profitability improves not only when costs are lowered, but when revenues expand as well. Pinpointing revenues-influencing factors related to markets, products and customers, and thus clarifying the relationship between resource investment and revenue fluctuations, are important research goals management accounting.However, research in management accounting has accomplished very little, where market and customers are concerned. The mission of this research is to discuss the development and feasibility of accounting measures related to marketing and research and development.While surveying existing research on accounting measures relat … More ed to markets, products and customers, we interviewed representatives from 20 leading companies in Japan. We also sent questionnaires to all of the 1,165 companies listed on Tokyo stock exchange, asking about management of R & D and marketing costs.The factors that varies revenue are called revenue drivers. They include, for examples, product quantity, product features, advertising expense, brand loyalty, sales promotion, namber of distribution channels, number of sales cutles, and number of retained and new customers. If the correlation between revenue and resources invested in a specific revenue drivers is quantified, we can make such investment more effective and efficient in attaining the revenue goals.There is a certain amount of correlation between advertising expense and revenue, and greater correlation between sales promotion expense and revenue. For practical purpose, however, such correlation is not cleary understood and such information is little used in decision-making.There is also certain correlation between new products and sales or profit. Despite the recession, companieswith a relatively large portion of new products in their product lines have been growing steadily and enjoying relatively high profitability. There have been attempts to measure R & D results as "technical stock, " calculate that from anticipated sales, and maintain it at a certain level. A very few companies have established systems that base their R & D investment levels on some logical ground.We have seen few examples of revenue drivers and technological stock in practical use as control tools in Japanese companies. It is possible, technically, to develop such accounting measures. By accumulation fact-finding research, we must develop and promote models that can help project more precisely the correlation between investment and revenue. Less