Integrating Marketing and Financial Decision Making: Experiential Spreadsheet Applications

Abstract

Marketing must generate profits for a business to survive. To make profits, marketing students need to be able to determine the costs and forecast and track the revenues generated by specific marketing plans. Unfortunately, a lack of fundamental finance skills often hinders the ability of marketing students to formulate profitable marketing strategies and to successfully complete integrative class assignments such as business cases. We developed a set of experiential spreadsheet exercises that help students grasp the important interactions between financial analysis and marketing decision making. We then assessed student performance and attitudes towards the spreadsheet exercises.