Janet Dignan, founder of IR Magazine, introduces this year's report
Over the decades, IR Magazine’s investor perception studies in the US market have monitored and documented investor relations professionals’ growing importance. In our very first study, there were just two companies – McDonald’s and Intel – among the top five companies for both best overall investor relations and best investor relations officer. The crossover between best overall IR and best senior management communications, on the other hand, was very marked. Just one company separated the two charts: McDonald’s was fifth in the best overall category but sixth in senior management communications, leaving scope for Microsoft to move into third place for its senior management comms. Bill Gates left his mark wherever he went.
As the years went by, however, the performance of IR professionals really began to matter. In separate surveys, we no longer heard members of the investment community insist they wanted to meet only with members of senior management teams, not IROs. Indeed, an increasingly common comment emerged, to the effect that they were just as happy talking with the IRO as the CEO or CFO. It’s not hard to see why this came about. It was the result of a virtuous circle in which more was being demanded of investor relations officers, so more qualified people were becoming interested in the profession and being taken on. This in turn meant more investors and analysts meeting knowledgeable and competent IROs they felt they could trust and from whom they could get genuinely useful information.
Nor is it hard to see why this would lead to a strong correlation between companies winning the award for best overall IR and those winning the award for the best IR professional. But it is, if not surprising, at least worth noting that currently both these awards seem pretty crucial to overall performance. They certainly both matter more than our other categories – from which one can probably conclude that this is further evidence of the overall importance of investor relations to listed companies.
Here are this year’s top-scoring large-cap companies for the three categories mentioned
As with so much research, some responses to this will be of the variety, ‘Why did they need to research that? We knew that would be the answer’. But it has to be helpful to be able to demonstrate that such assumptions are supported by facts. And research, as any IRO worth his or her salt knows for a demonstrable fact, is important.
What is also important is knowing they’re in a profession whose value and relevance remain on an upward trajectory. For evidence of how things have changed, here’s a quote from our first US survey back in 1996: ‘Information needs to come through the fax or some other way that is much quicker than the regular mail.’
Yes, times have changed –but some things remain the same. Whoever’s telling the corporate story – IRO, CEO, CFO or someone else – must still tell it honestly and knowledgeably. Perhaps that’s why senior management and IROs have similar significance for the judgment of IR quality. It’s certainly a determinant of which companies and individuals end up at the top of our research category lists. And those individuals and organizations – named on the following pages – deserve our congratulations and respect.