The basic task

Real financial public relations, as opposed to the fizzy and more dramatic takeover bid, is a steady, long-term business dealing with a set calendar of events, the patient explanation of results, and what a company does and does not do.

However, as with any other piece of detailed information, a company’s results are only meaningful against a background of understanding and an idea of what they mean for the future. If financial public relations were to be defined as simply the communication of sets of numbers to a highly specialized audience, it is difficult to explain how a significant number of companies in the UK magazine PR Week’s Top 50 Consultancies are entirely or significantly dedicated to financial or City public relations.

As the majority of shareholders are the major stock holding institutions rather than individual shareholders, it has become accepted that shareholders are talked about in inanimate terms of ‘institutions’ or ‘funds’ or ‘computer programmes’. But even institutions are run and managed by mere mortals, and their computer programmes written by people with still a shred of humanity left: financial public relations has to recognize that the managers who populate the investment institutions are affected by everything they see, read or hear about a company, its management, its reputation and its products. Financial public relations could, therefore, be taken to cover any aspect of public relations for commercial organization.

For large and truly international companies such as Hanson PLC with a range of major businesses in their portfolio the presentation of each set of results requires a tremendous amount of carefully hard-work and planning. Even a company that is as closely followed and well known as Hanson has to be very focused about the messages it puts out with results to ensure those who follow the company understand the full significance of the numbers.

In particular this involves very careful preparation of the presentation to be given to analysts. It is the views and the number crunching of the analysts that will influence the views of the other key audiences, including the financial press and the institutional shareholders.

Such presentations cannot be given in a vacuum and are prepared in response to feedback on what are the analysts’ major concerns and areas of interest. By researching the analysts’ concern in the period leading up to announcements the company can ensure it makes maximum use of the opportunity of its results presentations. The tightening of rules on selective disclosure of information has made set piece presentations even more important to a company’s communications programmes. Hanson, with a significant shareholding in the US, also goes to great lengths to teleconference its briefing to the US so that analysts and shareholders there receive company comment and information at the same time as those in London.

It is pointless to give people detailed information if they do not have the necessary background knowledge about a company’s activity and Hanson, as an international conglomerate, puts together a series of high quality teach-ins throughout the year on their core business areas. While these do not contain significant new information they are extremely popular with Hanson followers who are required to develop a real understanding of a range of companies in order to analyze the company accurately.