I work with a lot of accounting-types in my day job, and a lot of them are up in arms with CMA’s new advertising campaign. They’re rebranding the designation, which is “Certified Management Accountants” to “Creative Accountants.”

Now, many people mistrust accoutants. At the very least, they consider these people to be loveless number-crunching robots. But for some reason, these people are eyed with as much suspicion (at times) as lawyers. So calling them Creative Accountants is going to have some negative image consequences. When I read “Creative Accountant,” I think of cooked books and pseudo-legal tax evasion. Whether that’s the intention or not (I’ll assume it isn’t) is irrelevant.

The people at CMA need to think long and hard about what a marketing campaign like this can do to their good name. And just so you have a taste of what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube post below…

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=OAWcYue1l7Q]

accounting, CMA, creative accountant, sadness