Description
Financial Study on Principles of Communication With Financial Markets:- A financial market is a market in which people and entities can trade financial securities, commodities, and other fungible items of value at low transaction costs and at prices that reflect supply and demand. Securities include stocks and bonds, and commodities include precious metals or agricultural goods.
Financial Study on Principles of Communication with Financial Markets
Comparing attribute salience between product market and financial market communication
Abstract In this paper I comment on some results from ongoing research that is exploring differences between communication styles with two different corporate audiences, the general public versus the financial community. In this research I compare financial and public communication. I asked communicators with financial audiences (known as "investor relations (IR) officers") to rate ten characteristics of communication, and also asked public relations (PR) officers the same questions. I test the salience of ten messaging attributes. The results confirm my expectations; that communication with financial audiences has less scope for excitement, persuasion, self-expression, brevity or simplicity, and a greater need for accuracy and caution. Additionally, the analysis on gender provided some interesting possibilities for further research.
Key Words: Financial - Communication - Investor - Public - Relations - Principles - Messages Track: Corporate Governance
What is IR and how is it different from other external corporate communication? Is communication with financial audiences fundamentally different from communication with the general public? Does communication with financial audiences follow the principles of finance, or the principles of communication, or a blend of the two? Investor Relations and Public Relations have many similarities; they both aim at building the reputation of the corporation and can both be regarded as "boundary spanning" functions (Aldrich, 1979, p. 256) which aim to influence and understand particular external groups. Both types of communication can be viewed as having the purpose of facilitating others to make economic decisions, in the case of PR this would be chiefly customers purchasing products, in the case of IR this would be chiefly investors purchasing corporate stock. Yet the two disciplines also have many fundamental differences. IR is a more specialised activity, it only being relevant for publicly listed companies, whereas PR can benefit organisations of all types, and also individuals such as celebrities and politicians. 37% of IROs are qualified accountants, (VMA, 2012) and whether qualified or not, the language they talk is finance, specifically the financial performance and position of the firm. Helpfully, the principles of corporate financial communication are captured in official documents that all accountants must be familiar with through their training: "The objective of financial statements is to provide information about the reporting entity's financial performance and financial position that is useful to a wide range of users for assessing the stewardship of the entity's management and for making economic decisions." (ASB, 1999) In the UK, the ASB has published the following principles; relevance, reliability, comparability, understandability and materiality (ASB, 1999, 2007) These are shown in diagram1.
Diagram 1 (ASB, 1999) Four of these principles can be easily applied to consumer communication, whereas "comparability" is hard to apply to anything other then numerical data. Communication with investors will be carefully compared with previous information. Changes in corporate performance will obviously be noted, but so will changes in the quantity of information being disclosed and the "tone" of the commentary on the
numbers. Here, the "tone" means the level of optimism or pessimism in the message, by which the users can interpret the numbers. This means that IROs have to be careful with disclosures because every disclosure may set a precedent that is difficult to reverse. This is one way in which PR communication is different from IR communication; IR communication is part of a continuous stream of disclosure, rather than distinct news events. Attribute salience & hypotheses Communication with shareholders is a crucial part of corporate governance, and an essential skill of successful CEOs and CFOs, but there has been little work on how generic or specific this communication is. There has been a long debate in IR whether it is a communication discipline or a financial discipline. I regard the debate as pointless, as IR is clearly both, and wanted to demonstrate this empirically. My general hypothesis is that because IR is a hybrid discipline (Diagram 2), requiring knowledge of finance and law, along with the ability to manage relationships with investors and analysts, to write clear messages, and to "market" the company in a subtle way, it will share some of the communication principles with general PR, whilst exhibiting noticeable differences.
Diagram 2
I asked Public Relations (PR) practitioners and Investor Relations (IR) practitioners the same question: "Thinking about the target group you communicate with - to what extent are each of the following characteristics important in the messages that you send to that target group?" I tested my ten variables on many different corporate messages to check their power of analysis. Of the ten variables, I hypothesised that eight would show differences, and two would show similarity, expressing both the unity of the communication task and also the particularity of the requirements of different audiences. The results I anticipated are shown in table 1 below:
Expected Results
1 3 Caution Accuracy Clarity of meaning Exciting / eye-catching Simple language (avoidance of jargon etc) Persuasiveness Consistency (with style of previous messages) Self expression (of the author i.e. you) Brevity / Conciseness (as short as possible) Comprehensive (containing all the detail the reader may need for action)
Average Average IR PR L H L H H H H L H L H L L H H H H L L H
Expecting Diff 2 Diff Similarity 4 Diff 5 Diff 6 Diff Diff Diff Diff Similarity
7 8 9 10
Table 1 Although it would have been nice to include twenty attributes and cover lots more ground, there are real hazards with this: the difficulty in finding commonly understood words that express very tightly defined concepts, the greater hazard of concept overlap, and the mental exhaustion that long lists can produce on the participant, with the greater chance of terminated questionnaires or incomplete responses.
I included gender to measure the proposition that women have different communication styles to men (Froehlich and Peters, 2006), and also so that I could attempt to isolate the gender effect, because the gender mix of PR and IR is very different, with PR being dominated by females, whilst IR is the reverse. I also recorded the number of years' experience of each practitioner to measure whether communication style changes as professionals mature, and so that I would have the option of excluding inexperienced respondents. Following the creation of dummy tables and the piloting of the questions with a few colleagues, the questionnaire was ready for distribution. Sample selection I compiled an email list of about sixty public relations practitioners; about half experienced in consumer communications, and half in investor communications, and emailed them a short introductory email and a link to the questionnaire. Half an hour later I added gender to the background information, but this meant that two responses did not have gender as they had already completed the questionnaire. The response from this direct method was very limited, the two responses I got within a few minutes were the only responses I ever got from this sample. I decided to use "linked in", and posted my questionnaire to about a dozen IR and PR linkedin groups. This was not only much less laborious then digging out individual emails from corporate websites but gave me a much higher level of responses. Within three weeks I had the hundred responses that I wanted.
Collating and cleaning the data
IR 38 2 1 36 PR 64 2 7 62 T ot al 102 4 8 98
Responses received Rejected Incomplete but accepted Responses accepted
Table 2 Each response was inspected to check that they had been completed with due care. This was a voluntary questionnaire, and a short questionnaire, with no reward for completion, so it was expected that all respondents would want to provide accurate data. The ideal response would be complete (all ten variables answered), and would demonstrate that the respondent was taking care over each of the ten variables, which could be shown by (a) the respondent showing an ability to utilise the full range of responses and (b) the responses changing each time, and not forming an obvious pattern. A good response might resemble this:
Sample 1 I decided to remove any response that didn't utilise three of the five scales. This meant the removal of just two responses. I accepted incomplete responses, so long as at least seven of the variables were completed, as blanks would not cause a problem for the statistical results.
Sample 2
T ab l e 3
The results are summarised in Table 4 below:
1 2 3 4 Characteristic Caution Accuracy Clarity Exciting SD Mean 1.19 3.5 0.48 4.8 0.41 4.8 1.14 3.6 0.82 1.08 0.85 1.21 0.94 0.98 4.1 3.7 4.3 2.3 3.5 4.0 N COV PR STD IR STD PR Avg IR Avg Variance 89 0.3 1.2 1.0 3.2 3.9 0.7 90 0.1 0.6 0.2 4.7 4.9 0.2 90 0.1 0.4 0.4 4.8 4.8 0.0 90 0.3 0.9 1.0 4.0 2.8 -1.3 89 89 88 90 88 88 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.2 0.9 1.0 0.9 1.2 0.7 1.1 0.9 1.0 4.4 4.1 4.1 2.5 3.7 4.0 3.8 3.1 4.6 2.0 3.1 4.1 -0.6 -1.0 0.4 -0.5 -0.6 0.1
T-Test (2 Tail) Significant at 95%
0.003 0.050 0.522 0.000 0.001 0.000 0.047 0.008 0.008 0.768
Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
5 Simple language 6 Persuasiveness 7 Consistency 8 Self expression 9 Brevity 10 Comprehensive Count (yrs) Male
98 62 98 13.7 45% 39%
36 Experience 14.0 13.0 54%
Table 4 Testing for statistical significance The usual test for measuring differences between means from two separate groups of subjects is the t-test. This is a "two-tailed" test because variances in either direction are significant. Eight variables possessed statistically significant differences at 95%. The differences between PR and IR messages are represented visually in diagram 3. I have used a radar chart (also known as a spider chart or a cobweb chart) which is a graphical method of displaying multivariate data using equi-angular spokes, called radii, with each spoke representing one of the variables.
Diagram 3
Expected Results
1 Caution Accuracy Clarity of meaning Exciting / eye-catching Simple language (avoidance of jargon etc) Persuasiveness Consistency (with style of previous messages) Self expression (of the author i.e. you) Brevity / Conciseness (as short as possible) Comprehensive (containing all the detail the reader may need for action) Average Average IR PR L H L H H H H L H L H L L H H H H L L H Expecting Diff Diff Similarity Diff Diff Diff Diff Diff Diff Similarity Hypothesis Accepted 2 Accepted 3 Accepted 4 Accepted 5 Accepted 6 Accepted Accepted Accepted Accepted Accepted
7 8 9 10
Table 5 As Table 5 shows, all of my ten hypotheses were confirmed. Provisional Conclusions Using Table 4, and looking first at communication in general, and the responses as a whole, we can discern the following principles of communication. • Two universal principles (score of 5) of accuracy and clarity. • Five core principles (Score of 4+), which includes the two universal principles plus consistency, simplicity, and comprehensivity. • Nine common principles (score 3+) which includes the five core principles plus persuasiveness, excitement, caution and brevity. The three respects in which IR and PR are the same are accuracy, claity and comprehensivity. These are the three generic (or universal attributes) of external communication. The seven respects in which IR and PR are different are consistency, simplicity, persuasiveness, excitement, caution, brevity and self-expression. These are the seven stakeholder specific (or situational) attributes of external communication.
For PR, there are eight core principles (score of 4+), and for IR six. The six core principles for PR are: (in order of significance) clarity, accuracy, simplicity, style consistency, persuasiveness, excitement and comprehensivity. IR has fewer core principles because brevity, persuasiveness and excitement excluded, but IR has one additional core principle, the principle of caution. The distinctive principles of financial communication. IR has stronger scores on four variables, but two of these variances are very small, leaving just caution and consistency as positive principles for IR. "Consistency" clearly fits closely with the ASB's principle of "comparability", whilst caution perhaps fits closely with the traditional accounting principle of "prudence" ("Prudence" is included within the definition of "reliability" in the ASB's Statement of Principles (ASB, 1999)) Further work is still required to uncover further positive characteristics of communication to financial stakeholders. Gender analysis
Caution Accuracy Clarity Exciting 0. 1 0.1 0.3 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0.0 0.3 PR Gender Variance -0.2 -0.1 0. 4 A ll Simple language -0.1 0.1 0.1 Persuasiveness -0.7 0.2 0.3 Consistency 0. 2 0. 0 0.1 Self expression -0.1 -0.6 0.1 Brevity -0.3 -0.4 0. 0 Comprehensive 0. 7 0. 2 -0.3
Gender Variance Gender Variance 0.3
IR -
Table 6 The gender analysis is shown in table 6. Overall, there were clear (but slight) results that men use more self-expression, whereas women use more detail. The results for persuasiveness were contradictory. Contributions of the research Research is used both to discover and to confirm, and this research does both. The research mostly confirms my own "hunches" about the nature of IR and PR. The research demonstrates that financial communication has considerable differences from general corporate communication, whilst generic principles of generic of communication do exist. The most surprising features of the research may be the differences in communication styles by gender, which certainly require more empirical work. Methodological Issues Should a minimum level of experience be set for participation in the survey? Experience ranges from 1 year to 36 years. Is one year's experience enough to comment on communication experience, since the full range of communication circumstances will not yet have been experienced by the participant, and they may not have been tested in their roles. Junior practitioners are likely to be heavily supervised so may not be cognisant of the principles that guide the department. Limitations of this research (1) Some interviewees were novices in public relations and some were experienced who may or may not share the same perspective as experienced practitioners. (2) There is a limited sample size (100) at this point in the research, as responses are still being received. (3) The sample was self-selecting. Next stages (1) Further data collection on gender communication styles. (2) Analysis by years of experience. (3) Sending the survey to additional participants. (4) Further data collection on additional variables, to ascertain the "positive" principles of IR. (5) A new questionnaire, which includes the background of the
IRO and PRO, and the reporting lines of the IR & PR functions. (6) Expert interpretation of the results via email and/or interview. References Accounting Standards Board (1999) Statement of principles for financial reporting, The Accounting Standards Board Limited Accounting Standards Board (2007) Statement of principles for financial reporting: Interpretation For Public Benefit Entities, The Accounting Standards Board Limited Aldrich, H.E. (1979) Organizations And Environments, Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall Allen, D. (2004). Fundamentals of investor relations. In B. F. Cole (Ed.), The new investor relations: Expert perspectives on the state of the art (pp. 3-21). Princeton, NJ: Bloomberg Press. Argenti, P. (2003). Corporate communication. 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Clutterbuck, D. (2001). The communicating company. Journal of Communication Management, 6 (1), 70-77 Cornelissen, J. (2011). Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice, London: Sage Froehlich, R. and Peters, S. (2006). "Women's surge towards PR agencies - the role of 'new' gender stereotypes and the organizational context", paper presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the International Communications Association Conference, Dresden, Germany, 19-23 June. Hoffmann, A. O. I., Pennings, J. M. E., & Wies, S. (2011). Relationship Marketing's Role in Managing the Firm-Investor Dyad, Journal of Business Research, Vol 64, 896-903 Hutton, J.G. (1996), 'Integrated marketing communications and the evolution of marketing thought', Journal of Business Research, 37: 155-162. Kameda, N. (2005). A research paradigm for international business communication Corporate Communications: An International Journal. 10 (2), 168-182. Kotler, P. and Mindak, W. (1978), 'Marketing and public relations: should they be partners or rivals?', Journal of Marketing, 42 (10): 13-20
doc_719802432.docx
Financial Study on Principles of Communication With Financial Markets:- A financial market is a market in which people and entities can trade financial securities, commodities, and other fungible items of value at low transaction costs and at prices that reflect supply and demand. Securities include stocks and bonds, and commodities include precious metals or agricultural goods.
Financial Study on Principles of Communication with Financial Markets
Comparing attribute salience between product market and financial market communication
Abstract In this paper I comment on some results from ongoing research that is exploring differences between communication styles with two different corporate audiences, the general public versus the financial community. In this research I compare financial and public communication. I asked communicators with financial audiences (known as "investor relations (IR) officers") to rate ten characteristics of communication, and also asked public relations (PR) officers the same questions. I test the salience of ten messaging attributes. The results confirm my expectations; that communication with financial audiences has less scope for excitement, persuasion, self-expression, brevity or simplicity, and a greater need for accuracy and caution. Additionally, the analysis on gender provided some interesting possibilities for further research.
Key Words: Financial - Communication - Investor - Public - Relations - Principles - Messages Track: Corporate Governance
What is IR and how is it different from other external corporate communication? Is communication with financial audiences fundamentally different from communication with the general public? Does communication with financial audiences follow the principles of finance, or the principles of communication, or a blend of the two? Investor Relations and Public Relations have many similarities; they both aim at building the reputation of the corporation and can both be regarded as "boundary spanning" functions (Aldrich, 1979, p. 256) which aim to influence and understand particular external groups. Both types of communication can be viewed as having the purpose of facilitating others to make economic decisions, in the case of PR this would be chiefly customers purchasing products, in the case of IR this would be chiefly investors purchasing corporate stock. Yet the two disciplines also have many fundamental differences. IR is a more specialised activity, it only being relevant for publicly listed companies, whereas PR can benefit organisations of all types, and also individuals such as celebrities and politicians. 37% of IROs are qualified accountants, (VMA, 2012) and whether qualified or not, the language they talk is finance, specifically the financial performance and position of the firm. Helpfully, the principles of corporate financial communication are captured in official documents that all accountants must be familiar with through their training: "The objective of financial statements is to provide information about the reporting entity's financial performance and financial position that is useful to a wide range of users for assessing the stewardship of the entity's management and for making economic decisions." (ASB, 1999) In the UK, the ASB has published the following principles; relevance, reliability, comparability, understandability and materiality (ASB, 1999, 2007) These are shown in diagram1.
Diagram 1 (ASB, 1999) Four of these principles can be easily applied to consumer communication, whereas "comparability" is hard to apply to anything other then numerical data. Communication with investors will be carefully compared with previous information. Changes in corporate performance will obviously be noted, but so will changes in the quantity of information being disclosed and the "tone" of the commentary on the
numbers. Here, the "tone" means the level of optimism or pessimism in the message, by which the users can interpret the numbers. This means that IROs have to be careful with disclosures because every disclosure may set a precedent that is difficult to reverse. This is one way in which PR communication is different from IR communication; IR communication is part of a continuous stream of disclosure, rather than distinct news events. Attribute salience & hypotheses Communication with shareholders is a crucial part of corporate governance, and an essential skill of successful CEOs and CFOs, but there has been little work on how generic or specific this communication is. There has been a long debate in IR whether it is a communication discipline or a financial discipline. I regard the debate as pointless, as IR is clearly both, and wanted to demonstrate this empirically. My general hypothesis is that because IR is a hybrid discipline (Diagram 2), requiring knowledge of finance and law, along with the ability to manage relationships with investors and analysts, to write clear messages, and to "market" the company in a subtle way, it will share some of the communication principles with general PR, whilst exhibiting noticeable differences.
Diagram 2
I asked Public Relations (PR) practitioners and Investor Relations (IR) practitioners the same question: "Thinking about the target group you communicate with - to what extent are each of the following characteristics important in the messages that you send to that target group?" I tested my ten variables on many different corporate messages to check their power of analysis. Of the ten variables, I hypothesised that eight would show differences, and two would show similarity, expressing both the unity of the communication task and also the particularity of the requirements of different audiences. The results I anticipated are shown in table 1 below:
Expected Results
1 3 Caution Accuracy Clarity of meaning Exciting / eye-catching Simple language (avoidance of jargon etc) Persuasiveness Consistency (with style of previous messages) Self expression (of the author i.e. you) Brevity / Conciseness (as short as possible) Comprehensive (containing all the detail the reader may need for action)
Average Average IR PR L H L H H H H L H L H L L H H H H L L H
Expecting Diff 2 Diff Similarity 4 Diff 5 Diff 6 Diff Diff Diff Diff Similarity
7 8 9 10
Table 1 Although it would have been nice to include twenty attributes and cover lots more ground, there are real hazards with this: the difficulty in finding commonly understood words that express very tightly defined concepts, the greater hazard of concept overlap, and the mental exhaustion that long lists can produce on the participant, with the greater chance of terminated questionnaires or incomplete responses.
I included gender to measure the proposition that women have different communication styles to men (Froehlich and Peters, 2006), and also so that I could attempt to isolate the gender effect, because the gender mix of PR and IR is very different, with PR being dominated by females, whilst IR is the reverse. I also recorded the number of years' experience of each practitioner to measure whether communication style changes as professionals mature, and so that I would have the option of excluding inexperienced respondents. Following the creation of dummy tables and the piloting of the questions with a few colleagues, the questionnaire was ready for distribution. Sample selection I compiled an email list of about sixty public relations practitioners; about half experienced in consumer communications, and half in investor communications, and emailed them a short introductory email and a link to the questionnaire. Half an hour later I added gender to the background information, but this meant that two responses did not have gender as they had already completed the questionnaire. The response from this direct method was very limited, the two responses I got within a few minutes were the only responses I ever got from this sample. I decided to use "linked in", and posted my questionnaire to about a dozen IR and PR linkedin groups. This was not only much less laborious then digging out individual emails from corporate websites but gave me a much higher level of responses. Within three weeks I had the hundred responses that I wanted.
Collating and cleaning the data
IR 38 2 1 36 PR 64 2 7 62 T ot al 102 4 8 98
Responses received Rejected Incomplete but accepted Responses accepted
Table 2 Each response was inspected to check that they had been completed with due care. This was a voluntary questionnaire, and a short questionnaire, with no reward for completion, so it was expected that all respondents would want to provide accurate data. The ideal response would be complete (all ten variables answered), and would demonstrate that the respondent was taking care over each of the ten variables, which could be shown by (a) the respondent showing an ability to utilise the full range of responses and (b) the responses changing each time, and not forming an obvious pattern. A good response might resemble this:
Sample 1 I decided to remove any response that didn't utilise three of the five scales. This meant the removal of just two responses. I accepted incomplete responses, so long as at least seven of the variables were completed, as blanks would not cause a problem for the statistical results.
Sample 2
T ab l e 3
The results are summarised in Table 4 below:
1 2 3 4 Characteristic Caution Accuracy Clarity Exciting SD Mean 1.19 3.5 0.48 4.8 0.41 4.8 1.14 3.6 0.82 1.08 0.85 1.21 0.94 0.98 4.1 3.7 4.3 2.3 3.5 4.0 N COV PR STD IR STD PR Avg IR Avg Variance 89 0.3 1.2 1.0 3.2 3.9 0.7 90 0.1 0.6 0.2 4.7 4.9 0.2 90 0.1 0.4 0.4 4.8 4.8 0.0 90 0.3 0.9 1.0 4.0 2.8 -1.3 89 89 88 90 88 88 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.2 0.9 1.0 0.9 1.2 0.7 1.1 0.9 1.0 4.4 4.1 4.1 2.5 3.7 4.0 3.8 3.1 4.6 2.0 3.1 4.1 -0.6 -1.0 0.4 -0.5 -0.6 0.1
T-Test (2 Tail) Significant at 95%
0.003 0.050 0.522 0.000 0.001 0.000 0.047 0.008 0.008 0.768
Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
5 Simple language 6 Persuasiveness 7 Consistency 8 Self expression 9 Brevity 10 Comprehensive Count (yrs) Male
98 62 98 13.7 45% 39%
36 Experience 14.0 13.0 54%
Table 4 Testing for statistical significance The usual test for measuring differences between means from two separate groups of subjects is the t-test. This is a "two-tailed" test because variances in either direction are significant. Eight variables possessed statistically significant differences at 95%. The differences between PR and IR messages are represented visually in diagram 3. I have used a radar chart (also known as a spider chart or a cobweb chart) which is a graphical method of displaying multivariate data using equi-angular spokes, called radii, with each spoke representing one of the variables.
Diagram 3
Expected Results
1 Caution Accuracy Clarity of meaning Exciting / eye-catching Simple language (avoidance of jargon etc) Persuasiveness Consistency (with style of previous messages) Self expression (of the author i.e. you) Brevity / Conciseness (as short as possible) Comprehensive (containing all the detail the reader may need for action) Average Average IR PR L H L H H H H L H L H L L H H H H L L H Expecting Diff Diff Similarity Diff Diff Diff Diff Diff Diff Similarity Hypothesis Accepted 2 Accepted 3 Accepted 4 Accepted 5 Accepted 6 Accepted Accepted Accepted Accepted Accepted
7 8 9 10
Table 5 As Table 5 shows, all of my ten hypotheses were confirmed. Provisional Conclusions Using Table 4, and looking first at communication in general, and the responses as a whole, we can discern the following principles of communication. • Two universal principles (score of 5) of accuracy and clarity. • Five core principles (Score of 4+), which includes the two universal principles plus consistency, simplicity, and comprehensivity. • Nine common principles (score 3+) which includes the five core principles plus persuasiveness, excitement, caution and brevity. The three respects in which IR and PR are the same are accuracy, claity and comprehensivity. These are the three generic (or universal attributes) of external communication. The seven respects in which IR and PR are different are consistency, simplicity, persuasiveness, excitement, caution, brevity and self-expression. These are the seven stakeholder specific (or situational) attributes of external communication.
For PR, there are eight core principles (score of 4+), and for IR six. The six core principles for PR are: (in order of significance) clarity, accuracy, simplicity, style consistency, persuasiveness, excitement and comprehensivity. IR has fewer core principles because brevity, persuasiveness and excitement excluded, but IR has one additional core principle, the principle of caution. The distinctive principles of financial communication. IR has stronger scores on four variables, but two of these variances are very small, leaving just caution and consistency as positive principles for IR. "Consistency" clearly fits closely with the ASB's principle of "comparability", whilst caution perhaps fits closely with the traditional accounting principle of "prudence" ("Prudence" is included within the definition of "reliability" in the ASB's Statement of Principles (ASB, 1999)) Further work is still required to uncover further positive characteristics of communication to financial stakeholders. Gender analysis
Caution Accuracy Clarity Exciting 0. 1 0.1 0.3 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0.0 0.3 PR Gender Variance -0.2 -0.1 0. 4 A ll Simple language -0.1 0.1 0.1 Persuasiveness -0.7 0.2 0.3 Consistency 0. 2 0. 0 0.1 Self expression -0.1 -0.6 0.1 Brevity -0.3 -0.4 0. 0 Comprehensive 0. 7 0. 2 -0.3
Gender Variance Gender Variance 0.3
IR -
Table 6 The gender analysis is shown in table 6. Overall, there were clear (but slight) results that men use more self-expression, whereas women use more detail. The results for persuasiveness were contradictory. Contributions of the research Research is used both to discover and to confirm, and this research does both. The research mostly confirms my own "hunches" about the nature of IR and PR. The research demonstrates that financial communication has considerable differences from general corporate communication, whilst generic principles of generic of communication do exist. The most surprising features of the research may be the differences in communication styles by gender, which certainly require more empirical work. Methodological Issues Should a minimum level of experience be set for participation in the survey? Experience ranges from 1 year to 36 years. Is one year's experience enough to comment on communication experience, since the full range of communication circumstances will not yet have been experienced by the participant, and they may not have been tested in their roles. Junior practitioners are likely to be heavily supervised so may not be cognisant of the principles that guide the department. Limitations of this research (1) Some interviewees were novices in public relations and some were experienced who may or may not share the same perspective as experienced practitioners. (2) There is a limited sample size (100) at this point in the research, as responses are still being received. (3) The sample was self-selecting. Next stages (1) Further data collection on gender communication styles. (2) Analysis by years of experience. (3) Sending the survey to additional participants. (4) Further data collection on additional variables, to ascertain the "positive" principles of IR. (5) A new questionnaire, which includes the background of the
IRO and PRO, and the reporting lines of the IR & PR functions. (6) Expert interpretation of the results via email and/or interview. References Accounting Standards Board (1999) Statement of principles for financial reporting, The Accounting Standards Board Limited Accounting Standards Board (2007) Statement of principles for financial reporting: Interpretation For Public Benefit Entities, The Accounting Standards Board Limited Aldrich, H.E. (1979) Organizations And Environments, Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall Allen, D. (2004). Fundamentals of investor relations. In B. F. Cole (Ed.), The new investor relations: Expert perspectives on the state of the art (pp. 3-21). Princeton, NJ: Bloomberg Press. Argenti, P. (2003). Corporate communication. 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Clutterbuck, D. (2001). The communicating company. Journal of Communication Management, 6 (1), 70-77 Cornelissen, J. (2011). Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice, London: Sage Froehlich, R. and Peters, S. (2006). "Women's surge towards PR agencies - the role of 'new' gender stereotypes and the organizational context", paper presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the International Communications Association Conference, Dresden, Germany, 19-23 June. Hoffmann, A. O. I., Pennings, J. M. E., & Wies, S. (2011). Relationship Marketing's Role in Managing the Firm-Investor Dyad, Journal of Business Research, Vol 64, 896-903 Hutton, J.G. (1996), 'Integrated marketing communications and the evolution of marketing thought', Journal of Business Research, 37: 155-162. Kameda, N. (2005). A research paradigm for international business communication Corporate Communications: An International Journal. 10 (2), 168-182. Kotler, P. and Mindak, W. (1978), 'Marketing and public relations: should they be partners or rivals?', Journal of Marketing, 42 (10): 13-20
doc_719802432.docx