Lemonade Insurance: How Category Creators Talk, And Why They Sound So Different From The Competition

Lemonade Insurance

This is an excerpt from our Wednesday newsletter, Category Pirates.

Every company talks about themselves to multiple audiences via several functions:

• Talking to current and prospective customers (e.g., marketing)
• Retaining current and recruiting future employees (e.g., human resources)
• Informing current and reaching new investors (e.g., investor relations).
• Communicating with your ecosystem of suppliers and partners (e.g., partner marketing)

All four audiences are critically important for a company.

With the advent of marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution, marketing is the furthest along in terms of using analytics to optimize its return on investment. But having studied investor relations content for the Fortune 100 fastest-growing companies, our sense is investor relations is the weakest of the four.

Too many companies treat investor relations (IR) as a financial function whose job is to communicate numbers. While that of course matters, growth investors do pay for prior performance. They invest in category potential. Savvy investors know that…