Trends in investor relations : treating investors as customers?

Many companies now treat shareholders as another customer group and apply marketing principles to investor relations; this is broadening the boundaries of traditional marketing thinking. There has been a shift from a transaction approach to a relationship approach in marketing (Gronross, 1994, Vargo & Lusch, 2004) as well as towards a more integrated approach to marketing communication (Schultz & Kitchen, 2000), however investor relations are in many cases still seen as separate from the “mainstream” marketing. This paper looks at the factors in the business environment that are changing the role of investor relations in companies, the various investor relations instruments and the increasing role that the Internet plays in treating investors as customers.