Since 2005, Exxon Mobil has held the top spot as the most valuable company in the United States. As the Associated Press reported, for the first time since 2005, Exxon Mobile was ousted from the top spot on August 9, 2011 when Apple surpassed Exxon Mobile as the most valuable U.S. company.

These two companies are close when it comes to being crowned the nation’s most valuable company, and considering that other companies have quite a gap to fill in order to catch up to Exxon Mobile and Apple, it can be assumed that the battle will continue between just these two powerful companies at least in the short term.

However, this activity brings some interesting considerations about the value of the Exxon Mobile and Apple brands as well as the products they offer.

Exxon Mobile is an oil company. Oil is a necessary evil to many consumers. Exxon Mobile makes a lot of money — earnings grew by 41% to $10.68 billion during the second quarter of 2011, and the company posted its biggest profit ever of $14.8 billion during the third quarter of 2008, when most consumers were struggling through a difficult recession. This is a company that provides a product people need. Many consumers don’t like that they need Exxon Mobile’s product, but their hands are tied. Furthermore, the brand’s perception is tarnished by the fact that consumers would prefer not to be dependent on Exxon Mobile’s product and the fact that the company is doing extremely well while individuals are struggling economically and the country is in massive debt. It’s hard to have a positive perception about a company like that.

On the other hand, as the Associated Press points out, Apple offers a product people want. The brand isn’t perfect and it has its detractors and gets a fair share of deserved negative publicity, but at the heart of the company is innovation. Apple develops products that people don’t need. However, they want Apple products and gladly pull out their hard-earned money to pay for them. As a result, the brand’s overall image is far more positive than negative as are consumer perceptions of the brand.

It’s interesting to see these two businesses with extremely different business models, products, and brand promises battle it out for the top spot as the most valuable company in the United States. It’s a battle many people will be watching. Will you? Which brand do you think will win? In the short-term? In the long-term? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Alex E. Proimos

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 Corporate Eye

Every now and again, something happens that drives home to me generational differences. Usually, I wind up feeling really old when they occur, and just as usually it is my children that make me feel that way. And trust me, they are merciless in reminding me that I am no longer the slim, dark haired go-getter I remain in my mind’s eye.

Today, however, I was brought up short by one of my students. We were discussing a case in class and how to improve a company’s visibility with investors when one of my students suggested that one thing the company could do was to improve its web site. As the case occurred in 1993, I suggested to my student that most companies did not have web sites back then. She looked at me as if I were from Mars. The concept of a company not having a web site was utterly foreign to her.

Generational differences are fun to poke fun at, but I bring this up to make a slightly different point. That is, things can go from being considered an uncommon luxury to being to commonplace and essential in a very short period of time. So it is with investor relations web sites. Those of us that began our careers before the growth of the world wide web tend to think of such sites as adjuncts to ‘real’ information, which comes on pieces of paper or by talking to somebody. Consequently, the web site is often pushed down the chain of command as almost a clerical function or it is outsourced and forgotten about. Either way, the information content tends to languish.

However, if you have almost always relied upon the internet to feed you data, it’s your first default option to get information and it’s sure real to you. Everyone below the age of 25 that I’ve talked to feels this way. And these will be the analysts and portfolio managers of tomorrow.

So today’s thought on how to make your investor relations web site more effective: to look at the information you are providing to investors on your site with a critical eye at least once a year. The scope and pace of change on the internet is such that good companies have to regularly take a fresh set of eyes to the information they are providing to investors to make sure they are meeting the expectations of internet savvy younger investors.

And trust me, they’re getting younger every day (or at least it sure looks that way to me).

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 Corporate Eye

In the old days, before the internet, investor relations departments operated with the telephone and paper based communications. (You remember getting letters with stamps on them, don’t you?)

If you were a large corporation with a significant shareholder base, this meant that at certain times during the year, the volume of phone calls and letters would spike. Usually these increases would be around the issuance of dividend checks (When are they coming? Why haven’t I received mine? How do I replace a lost check?), and the annual general meeting (When is it? Where is it? Can my Aunt Sophie come too?), but certain other types of calls would occur with great regularity as well.

Around tax time, for example, many calls would come in trying to find out how much the shareholder had received in dividends over the past year as they had mislaid the tax reporting form mailed to them in January. Or the shareholder needed to figure out the tax cost basis of the stock they sold in the prior year. Or they had lost their stock certificate. The list goes on, but I will spare you.

The resulting quantity of calls and letters meant that the investor relations staff was stretched, response times slowed down and shareholders were not given the prompt attention they would normally receive. Authorizing more payroll to fix the problem was not considered a good fix as companies do not staff to meet peak demands. So we muddled through and breathed a sigh of relief when things calmed down.

Fortunately, the advent of company investor websites means that it is now possible to allow shareholders to look up much of this information for themselves. Further, they can do this whenever they want to, as opposed to being forced to call during business hours. Well designed Frequently Asked Questions sections (FAQs) can be very helpful in getting information to shareholders before they get frustrated. Set out below is a nice example of a FAQ section by Kingfisher, the home improvement retailer. They appear to have looked at their incoming questions from shareholders and attempted to design a page that answered many of them. It is a good example of using the web to help shareholders help themselves if they want to, but you will also note that at the very top of the page, shareholders are given a link to company contact information.

A lot of heartburn by both shareholders and investor relations departments can be avoided by following this example.

In this series:
Previous post: KPIs
Next post: Fresh Content

• What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 17: Make the Individual Shareholder Feel Welcome
• What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 14: Engaging the Individual Investor
• What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 13: Make Your Site More Mobile Friendly
• What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 12: Remember the Debt Side of the Balance Sheet
• What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 11: Make Your Interim Financial Results Easily Accessible

 Corporate Eye

There is an old saying in business, “If you can measure it, then you can manage it”.

The corollary to this is that if management thinks it is important enough to measure closely then investors ought to know about the measure so they can make their own assessment about how important it is to their ownership of the stock.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. There is a whole raft of business literature about using key performance indicators and dashboard techniques to run your business, but when you go looking for them on company websites, they are few and far between.

I am not advocating that investors need to be informed of every operating metric the company generates. This, in addition to being overly intrusive, would result in information overload, as the best companies produce many key performance indicators at all stages of their business. Further, too much detail would result in the revealing of proprietary information to competitors. But often there are five or six key data points that a company watches extremely carefully. These are the criteria that they often base performance reviews and compensation upon. And people will do what they are compensated and rewarded to do.

One company that does discuss key performance indicators in their online annual report is Standard Chartered. They do this first with an overview of the areas they wish to highlight, which I’ve set out here (click image to see a bigger view).

When you click on one of the sections such as “Building long-term, deep relationships with our clients and customers”, it opens up to specific KPIs, a portion of which is copied below. The result is a good, quick look at both the measures Standard Chartered thinks important and how they are performing against those measures.

Now if we can just get companies to do more of this and feature it someplace where it is easy to find, investors will more readily understand the way the business is being run.

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 Corporate Eye

When most people are children, they want to be someone special when they grow up; nobody ever wants to be just another anonymous person. So growing up and even later in life, we all foster a belief in our unique combination of talents and characteristics that make us a special person (at least to our spouses, children and dogs).

And so it is with companies as well. Every company strives to be unique. In business school they give it the fancy name of differentiation, but the concept is clear: your product or service offering needs to stand out from the competition. Even if your product is simply a ‘me too’ offering, there needs to be something that makes it more attractive in some aspect, whether that be price, delivery mechanism or simplicity of use, that will cause the customer to part with their money.

To take this analogy one step further and apply it to investing, if investors can be shown that a company occupies a unique position in the marketplace, they are more likely to understand the underlying investment thesis of the company and buy the stock.

click the image to enlarge

Take for example Burberry, the British apparel company. The firm has traditionally been thought of as a manufacturer of traditional trench coats, but more recently has pushed into fashion. How is an investor supposed to think of this?

Burberry addresses this in their corporate profile page, which I’ve set out here. After reading the page, an investor has a pretty good idea of why Burberry thinks of themselves as unique, and how they plan to use that attribute to grow the company.

So the takeaway here is clear: by telling investors why your company is special, you can help them focus on the reasons to own your stock.

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Next post: Key Performance Indicators

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 Corporate Eye