ABSTRACT
Building a corporate story from an investor relations perspective brings in many of the concepts we have covered so far. It is underpinned by a theoretical framework, from communication, public relations and applied finance. It is at the centre of describing corporate strategy as well as communicating it. It combines elements of marketing and selling and yet some striking differences in these concepts as well. Its content needs to bring in ideas of reputation and brand that underlie the progress of a business. It cannot be focused solely on a corporation but has to cover its industry, wider business context, stakeholders and trends. Its overall content needs to be capable of being represented in phrases, key messages, presentations, lengthier pieces of writing and website images, as well as encapsulations for social media. It needs to be able to be conveyed orally and in writing. Its essence needs to come through in news announced by a corporation as well as in its logos and slogans. Content needs to be shaped for the varying components of stakeholder audiences, some of which are better informed than others. It needs to be educational, covering elements of the past, present and future. While we have seen how communication of the corporate story can influence stock price, the content of the corporate story is about the business and its context, not the stock price. The story needs to be conscious of behavioural elements of stakeholder markets, which have expectations of what they want to hear from corporations. While story is a word with many connotations, a business version of a story has its own characteristics, not all of which are identical for every company. As a starting point for looking at these issues, the history of the evolution of investor relations is instructive. This leads to considering the many elements of a corporate story and its similarities and differences with selling and marketing as these disciplines apply to other aspects of a corporation’s business. It is also useful to consider what represents effective persuasion with well-informed investor audiences and how their specific information interests lead to elements of co-creation of corporate stories.
