IR Is Not Really Marketing (And the Difference Matters)

The conversation goes like this. An IR consultancy is pitching a listed company on a new engagement. The pitch deck is professional, the case studies are credible, and somewhere around slide eight there is a header that reads, in the manner of these documents: Marketing the Equity Story to Target Investors. The CFO across the table nods. The CEO has already nodded. The IRO would also nod if they were in the room. Everybody knows what marketing the equity story means. Everybody knows what target investors are. The vocabulary lands without examination, and the engagement, when it is signed, will produce a programme calibrated to what the vocabulary implies.

Six months later, the same company is wondering why its institutional ownership turnover has accelerated, why its analyst notes feel increasingly disconnected from how management thinks about the business, and why its quarterly reports keep producing the asymmetric stock-price reactions that Stock Price Is the Outcome, Not the Objective described. Nobody at the company connects the consequences to the vocabulary in the original pitch deck. The vocabulary is so standard that examining it feels like asking whether water is wet.

This is the fourth essay in the Divergence series. The earlier essays addressed operational questions: who to target, whether to guide quarterly, what the IR function is for. This one addresses the language the practitioner tradition uses to describe what IR is. The vocabulary, on examination, has been doing more work than its users have noticed. The work it has been doing is not neutral.

The investor-relations-as-marketing thesis

The IR-as-marketing thesis is unusually explicit in the practitioner literature. Bruce Marcus’s Competing for Capital (2005) builds the entire frame into its title: companies compete for capital, IR is the function that does the competing, and the analogy to consumer-product marketing is direct. Marcus’s first chapter explains the framing without apology. Stock is a product. The investor is the customer. The IR function is competitive marketing for capital allocation. The book proceeds from there.

William Mahoney’s Professional’s Guide to Financial Marketing and Communications (1990), whose title alone tells you what is being argued, establishes the framing earlier, and most of the practitioner shelf since has inherited it. The introductory textbooks open with the marketing paradigm; the operational manuals work within it without making the argument, because the argument has already been made.

The framing reaches its most explicit form in the NIRI Body of Knowledge, 2nd edition (2023). The relevant chapter describes IR professionals as “to some degree, in sales. They identify the buyers, create the marketing message, establish relationships, and are the first point of contact for providing compelling reasons to invest in the company.” This is the canonical US IR body of knowledge, written by the profession’s primary trade association, stating directly that IR is a sales-and-marketing function. The framing is not a metaphor that practitioners use casually. It is the foundational paradigm the profession’s most authoritative reference document operates from.

The convergence is close to total. Even the practitioner sources that never state the framing explicitly — the European texts, the study guides, the sell-side handbooks — operate within its assumptions without challenging them. The practitioner consensus on what IR is has been the marketing-and-sales framing for thirty years.

Why the framing has been doing more work than its users noticed

A vocabulary that organises a profession is not a neutral description of what the profession does. It is a set of operational defaults made portable. When you call something marketing, you import the assumptions of the marketing discipline along with the label. There is a product to be optimised, a customer to be attracted, a competitor to be beaten, a brand to be built, a segment to be targeted, a campaign to be executed, and a measurement to be calibrated to conversion. The vocabulary brings the operational kit. Practitioners using the vocabulary do not have to argue for the kit; they receive it pre-assembled.

This is the work the IR-as-marketing framing has been doing for forty years. Practitioners who would never describe their function as “managing the multiple through engineered communications” do exactly that, because the marketing vocabulary makes the activity feel like the natural expression of the framing. A CFO who would push back if asked to “manage investor perceptions to support the share price” will sign off on the same activity when it is described as “marketing the equity story.” The vocabulary makes the operational substance feel like the obvious thing to do rather than the choice it actually is.

Aswath Damodaran’s Narrative and Numbers engages this through a different mechanism. The marketing framing produces what Damodaran calls the impossible-story signature: claims of high growth combined with low risk combined with low reinvestment, delivered simultaneously, because that is what marketing optimises for and what audiences respond to in the short term. The valuation model prices the combination down regardless of how compelling the marketing is. Marketing-trained communicators produce these claims because the marketing playbook prescribes them; valuation-trained analysts recognise them and discount the result.

Lawrence Cunningham’s critique runs through the clientele effect that The Investor Base You Have Is the One You Chose introduced. Marketing-optimised communications attract marketing-responsive shareholders: short-duration holders, momentum funds, sentiment-driven generalists who price on signal proximity rather than narrative coherence. The shareholders most aligned with long-cycle business performance, concentrated and long-duration and narrative-aligned, are not the audience the marketing framing optimises for. The framing produces communications that systematically repel them. Nobody inside the company ever sees the cycle, because the company never meets the long-duration holders it never attracted.

Lynn Stout’s critique is the most structural. The marketing framing of IR is downstream of the shareholder-value-maximisation framing of the corporation itself. Once the corporation’s purpose is taken to be the maximisation of shareholder wealth as measured by share price, the IR function’s marketing posture, competitive marketing of the equity to the highest-bidder shareholders, becomes the obvious operational expression. Reject the upstream premise, and the marketing framing of IR loses its foundational support. The IR-as-marketing thesis is not, in Stout’s framing, a free-standing claim about what IR is. It is the operational arm of a contested ideology about what corporations are. None of this is on the table when the pitch deck reaches slide eight; the vocabulary settled the question before the meeting started.

Kedem’s interesting middle position

Adam Kedem occupies a position the other counter-thesis authors do not. His Investment Writing Handbook accepts the marketing vocabulary explicitly. The book’s argument is, at its core, about how to do investor communications as a marketing discipline well. Kedem does not say IR is not marketing. He says IR is marketing, and then he sets out the constraints under which honest marketing can be operationally distinguished from spin.

Kedem’s honest marketing principle is the constraint that does the work. When performance is poor with no justification or silver lining, the writer should do what investors expect of leaders: take responsibility, acknowledge investor disappointment, and demonstrate that course correction is serious. The marketing discipline must be built from genuinely compelling facts, presented without distortion. The skill is in the finding, not the spinning. A company that does not have something genuinely compelling cannot marketing-engineer its way out of it; a company that does, does not need to.

The interesting move Kedem makes is that honest marketing, followed all the way through, is indistinguishable from accurate information transfer. The marketing-trained communicator who follows Kedem’s constraint produces the same communications artefacts as the information-transfer-trained communicator who practises fact-anchored reassurance. The vocabulary differs. The output is the same. Fact-anchored reassurance — the discipline What Reassurance Actually Costs built out earlier in this body of work — and Kedem’s honest-marketing principle are, in operational substance, one thing expressed through two framings.

This is where the divergence in the literature becomes interesting rather than oppositional. Kedem’s framing suggests that the IR-as-marketing thesis is defensible only when the marketing discipline is constrained to honest marketing, which collapses operationally into information transfer. The marketing vocabulary, in this reading, is doing harm only when it is being used in its unconstrained form: the form most IR practitioners use day to day, and not the form the most careful writers on the IR-as-marketing side argue for.

So is investor relations marketing or not?

The question is partly semantic, but the semantic question matters because the vocabulary shapes practice. Three answers are available in the literature, and they are doing different work.

The practitioner tradition’s answer is yes, IR is marketing, and the tradition has decades of operational technique to teach about doing it well. This answer treats the vocabulary as descriptive. Practitioners are doing marketing, they should be trained as marketers, they should use marketing tools, and the discipline of marketing transferred from consumer or business-to-business contexts is the relevant frame. This is the practitioner consensus.

The cross-disciplinary answer is no, IR is not marketing; calling it marketing produces operational defaults that damage the function and the company. The marketing framing imports a customer-acquisition logic into a context where the investor is not a customer, the stock is not a product, and what is being competed for is not a purchase decision. The vocabulary is doing harm, the harm goes unseen by the practitioners using it, and the only durable response is to reject the framing and the operational defaults it carries.

Kedem’s answer is yes, IR is marketing, but the only defensible form of marketing in this context is honest marketing, which is operationally identical to accurate information transfer. This answer keeps the vocabulary but strips it of the operational defaults that the unconstrained version imports. The label survives. The activity it describes becomes something most practitioners using the label are not actually doing.

A fourth answer is implicit in the convergent principles the Bedrock series walked through. Fact-anchored reassurance, the elevator-pitch formula, trust as operational primitive, transparency as asymmetric-disclosure discipline. Whatever IR is, it is fundamentally information transfer with the marketing discipline of audience clarity preserved. The audience clarity that marketing teaches well — knowing who you are talking to, calibrating communication to what they need, measuring whether it landed — is preserved. The activity of persuasion-toward-purchase that marketing teaches in consumer contexts is not. This is the framing the cross-disciplinary literature implicitly converges on, even though no single source states it in exactly these terms.

The practical question for any IR programme is which of the four answers is operationally informing it. Most programmes, in my observation, are running on the first answer without examining it, and are paying the costs the second answer documents without knowing they are paying them. Pull last year’s IR plan, or the scope document from your current agency engagement, and check which answer wrote it.

Four artefacts, two framings

The vocabulary question becomes concrete in daily decisions about communications artefacts. A few specific differences:

Each of these differences is small in any single instance and significant cumulatively across multiple quarters. The cumulative effect is the difference between a company whose shareholder base is calibrated to its marketing posture and a company whose shareholder base is calibrated to its informational substance. Over years, the two companies trade differently, attract different holders, and compound different advantages.

On having signed off slide eight myself

I am the partner at an IR consultancy. The conversation at the start of this essay is a conversation I have had, on both sides of the table. I have signed off pitch decks that contained the marketing the equity story header without ever stopping to examine the framing. I have run engagements whose deliverables were calibrated to what the vocabulary implied. The clients who hired me on those engagements were not asking the question this essay is asking, and I was not bringing it to them. The pitch decks worked. The engagements produced what marketing-framed engagements produce. The clients were satisfied, by the criteria the framing makes salient.

What I missed was that the framing was making certain criteria salient and not others. The criteria the framing made salient were the ones marketing measures well: investor outreach metrics, analyst-coverage growth, share-price impact of communications activities. The criteria it did not make salient were the ones the cross-disciplinary literature treats as the actual measures of IR effectiveness: shareholder-base concentration and duration, long-cycle narrative-numbers coherence, disclosure ratio between favourable and unfavourable specifics, trust-reservoir trajectory across cycles. The second set is what the IR function should be optimising for, but the marketing vocabulary does not bring those measures with it. They are not part of the kit the vocabulary imports.

The specific intellectual error the IR practitioner tradition has been making, I think, is treating its own foundational vocabulary as descriptive when it is actually constitutive. The vocabulary is not describing what IR is; it is constructing what IR is, by importing the operational defaults of the discipline being borrowed from. Practitioners using the vocabulary have been operating those defaults without naming them. The defaults have been producing the consequences the cross-disciplinary literature documents, and the practitioners producing the consequences have been unable to see them, because the vocabulary that produced them was not in the set of things that got examined.

The vocabulary is not describing what IR is; it is constructing what IR is.

This is the kind of error that is hard to notice from inside the discipline that is making it. It took the cross-disciplinary literature — Damodaran from valuation, Stout from corporate law, Kedem from writing craft — to surface what the IR-practitioner tradition’s foundational vocabulary was doing. The tradition has not engaged the surfacing seriously. The vocabulary continues to do its work, mostly invisibly, in pitch decks and engagement scopes and earnings-call preparations across the profession.

The Asian-market amplification

Regional IR practice is, if anything, more marketing-tilted than US or European practice. The vendor ecosystem in most Asian markets is built around IR consultancies whose backgrounds are in financial public relations and corporate communications rather than in disclosure law or valuation analysis. The agencies bring marketing vocabulary because marketing is what they were trained in. The clients hiring them are typically CFOs or CEOs who were not trained in IR specifically and who use the vocabulary the consultancy provides. The framing propagates through the relationship by default.

The regional defaults produce IR programmes that look like marketing programmes for equity instruments: roadshow management, conference participation calendars, analyst-day production, fact-sheet design optimised for visual appeal, equity-story documents structured around persuasion rather than information. Each of these is a legitimate IR activity. The question is whether the activity is calibrated to information transfer with audience clarity intact, or to marketing of equity to highest-bidder audiences. The vocabulary the regional agency circuit uses pushes toward the second. The cross-disciplinary literature suggests the first is the one that works.

A regional listed company that engaged the framing question directly, that asked in a board conversation whether the IR function is marketing or information transfer, and what would be operationally different under each framing, would arrive at conclusions most peer companies are not arriving at. The conclusions would shape vendor selection, internal team structure, success measurement, and the daily operational defaults the IR function runs under. None of these would change tomorrow. All of them would change, if the framing took root, before the current vendor contract reached its second renewal.

Slide eight, revisited

The vocabulary is load-bearing across the profession. The trade-association credentialing is built on it, the agencies pitch in it, and the CFOs who hire IR services speak it back to them. A framing this standard never volunteers itself for examination, and that is precisely the property that has protected it this long. The costs it produces — shareholder churn that resists explanation, communications that buy sentiment-responsiveness instead of intrinsic-value recognition — arrive without a return address, so nothing in the company’s own reporting ever traces them to their source.

Stout’s book and Damodaran’s narrative-numbers work have been in circulation for fifteen years, both pointing at the framing problem from outside the profession. The tradition has not engaged either, because the framing feels too foundational to need examining. A company that runs the examination anyway ends up keeping what marketing genuinely teaches well — audience clarity, calibration, measurement — and stripping out the consumer-product defaults that came bundled with the label. Its artefacts change first, then its internal metrics, then, last of all, its language.

Which brings this essay back to slide eight. In a programme that has done that work, Marketing the Equity Story to Target Investors stops appearing in pitch decks, because nobody in the room will sign the sentence off any more. The activity has not stopped; it has been recognised as something other than what the marketing vocabulary describes. Everywhere else, the header survives review after review, and the vocabulary carries on doing the work nobody quite notices it is doing.

The closing essay in this series, Materiality Is a Choice, Not a Calculation, turns to a different but related question: what counts as material in the first place, and how the rules-based answer to that question diverges from what serious investors want. The vocabulary problem this essay describes and the materiality problem the closing essay describes are, in a sense, the same problem at different layers. Both are places where the inherited frame does work the inheritors have stopped noticing.