ABSTRACT
Among the reasons for looking at a theoretical framework from the perspectives of public relations and applied finance are that it provides a palette of influences for financial and investor communication, helping to establish priorities and guide implementation. Within this framework is a conception of corporations as they relate to stakeholders, a connection between messages, senders and receivers and signposts towards what makes communication effective. This establishes a further topic for consideration, which is the actual content of those messages. When companies listed on stock exchanges consider sending messages to their key stakeholders, they are subject to certain rules surrounding the compulsory disclosure of information. On any one day, thousands of these pieces of information are released, sometimes just technical details, at other times accounting figures or collections of facts or descriptions of company performance. These pieces of information in isolation do not necessarily contain a mechanism that can release the complexity they contain or one that can create a ripple effect of reverberations through a market that helps to make sense of information that has been released. If we adopt an analogy from rhetoric, facts and numbers are fundamental truths that on their own do not have legs. If they are to be more influential they need to be carried by people to people in the form of communication. We already know, from considering the efficient market hypothesis and the views of behavioural economists, that information has an influence on stock prices. Additionally, there is a growing body of evidence, reviewed in the next chapter, which shows that how information is communicated is a further influence on stock price. One notion that binds together the facts and figures of information, and provides a context, is narrative or story. Story is a device for converting information into communication. It is a powerful concept in interpersonal communication and has historical connections in myth. Story is used by historians and in fiction, in its many genres there are common narrative plots. Politicians rely on story to combine a reduction of complexity with a motivational platform and in business and management there is increasing use of narrative to bring about change and inspiration for new directions. Increasingly there are instances of company CEOs describing themselves as the chief storyteller. The corporate story can be a compelling mechanism for creating a structure around the communication of information and, to appreciate its role in the corporate sector, it is instructive to examine the pervasiveness of story in many aspects of our lives.
