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This paper investigates the nature of accountants' at- titudes toward advertising and the relationship of these attitudes to advertising practice. The analysis is done using a recent sample of CPAs certified and practicing in Michigan. We demonstrate that ac- countant attitudes, as expressed on this survey, can be broken down into five underlying factors. The first is a general factor related pri- marily to opinions on whether advertising helps the consumer and the accountant advertiser. The other four factors relate specifically to attitudes on the legal control issue, the perceived eflect of adver- tising on professional image, the perceived effect of advertising on prices, and, finally, concerns about the content of advertising mes- sages. From each of these factors we generate an attitude scale re- flecting favorability or optimismxgarding advertising. It is shown that favorability on four out of five scales is associated with the accountant's age; younger accountants are much more favorable to- ward advertising. Interestingly, our evidence also suggests that fe- inale accountants are less favorable toward advertising. Finally we investigate the question of whether these attitudes are related to ad- vertising practice. We find that whether or not an accountant adver- tises depends primarily on the general factor and on the image fac- tor. In common language, the accountants who advertise tend to be the ones who perceive the benefit of advertising to both the accoun- tant and the consumer and who are less concerned about its effects on the accountant's professional image. |
