How do you define financial public relations?

1. In common with the rest of public relations, financial public relations people suffer from an inability to define their jobs. Some simply like to state that financial public relations all comes down to money – but that could be said for the vast majority of public relations activities. Whether spent in-house or with a consultancy, why should a significant amount of money – an estimated ₤ 1/2 – 1 billion in the UK, and many times this amount in the US and the rest of Europe – be spent every year on public relations activity if a return on that investment is not merely hoped for but expected ? Financial public relations is no different in having to demonstrate that it adds value.

2. It is difficult to discuss any subject without some sort of definition. At its most basic the scope of financial public relations can be defined in simple investment terms as: ‘all communications activity is based around the simple fact that money only has real value as an investment and that investors are people’.

3. Share buyers may be investing their own or other people’s money but in the end investment decisions are made on the basis of the quality of people. In a world of constantly moving money, the clear communication of objectives, achievements and potential is not an optional extra, it is an absolute necessity.

4. More specifically, the skills of financial public relations people is primarily focused on the need for publicly owned and listed companies to communicate consistently and positively with those that own them directly or indirectly, through the media or through City analysts. The majority of the effort put into this specialist area of public relations surrounds the biannual issuing of results by companies.

5. For many millions of companies, large and small, around the world, the prosaic necessity of getting a proper understanding of their full year and half year figures is the most important part of any financial public relations strategy.

6. The hectic activity that surrounds major bid, deals and financial disasters is more dramatic, more newsworthy and more likely to be the subject of airport paperbacks, but it has much to do with crisis management activity as it does with financial public relations. Happily for those who enjoy working in the financial public relations area, the opening up and deregulation of world stock markets and the freeing up of international capital has made merger and acquisition work a significant part of financial public relations, a situation that seems likely to remain for many years to come.