Effective Financial Communication: Key Concepts, Empirical Insights, and Implications for Practice

Financial communication and investor relations are strategic corporate functions, tasked with fostering relationships with financial audiences, such as investors, analysts, and journalists. These financial audiences are of critical importance to the establishment, growth, and sustainable success of corporations. This book draws on insights from finance and accounting research, economics, and psychology as well as media and communication studies to explain the role of effective financial communication in corporate disclosure, storytelling, and relationship management on capital markets.

It explores both theories of and empirical evidence for effects of financial communication on key audiences and derives principles for effective financial communication and investor relations. This book develops a distinct perspective, guiding readers through the state of research by focusing on the effects and effectiveness of financial communication. For both practice and academia, it derives evidence-based implications for the role and management of financial communication and investor relations.

This book makes a valuable resource for scholars and graduate students studying or researching investor relations and financial communication across schools of communication, finance and accounting, and business and management. Offering practical implications, it will also serve as a much-needed guide for practitioners.

Christian Pieter Hoffmann is Professor of Communication Management at the Institute for Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig, and of Political Communication at the Institute of Political Science. He is academic director of the Center for Research in Financial Communication and co-director of the Center for Digital Participation.

Nadine Strauß is Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Strategic Communication and Media Management at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. Previously, she has completed a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment (University of Oxford), focusing on the role of communication for sustainable finance.