A CEO can be vague about a lot of things, but there’s one clear sign he is frustrated by a lagging stock price – a big newspaper ad.
Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, is the latest to write a check to proclaim the virtues of his company’s shares. Will it work?
Although it doesn’t appear in the formal job description, keeping the stock aloft is a big part of a CEO’s role. Most CEOs obsess over the stock’s performance, and for good reasons: They own a pile of shares, and no CEO can last if the stock flatlines.
So the CEO will serenade big shareholders, send the CFO and investor relations team to cajole investment analysts, pump out snappy power-points and give interviews to the news media. And if after all that the stock still won’t budge, there’s one thing left for the CEO to try: A full-page ad in a big newspaper.
And that’s exactly what GE did. It bought a full-page in the Sunday New York Times last weekend. Its message, once you get past the funny words (“indugital” and “digidustrial”) was simple: The way GE makes its money is changing.
Under Jeff Immelt, GE is undertaking a major transformation of its business, shedding its financial services businesses and bulking up in industrial services. Its acquisition of Alsthom’s power unit, recently approved by European regulators, is central to that effort. Once the deal is completed and its remaining finance units are sold, GE expects to generate 90 percent of its earnings from industrial businesses. That’s a big change from the pre-crisis era, when financial services produced most of the profits.
But Wall Street has been skeptical. GE’s stock is off about 2% over the past year, compared to a flat performance by the S&P 500.
GE’s ad strategy is like that of a presidential campaign having difficulty getting its message across. Ads are a quick (if expensive) way to get attention, and if you spend enough, people will notice and start to shift their perceptions. Of course, ads have the added benefit of allowing you to say exactly what you want without any filtering or interpretation from pesky reporters and analysts.
But the target for GE is investors, a mostly smart bunch who do their own thinking and are generally immune to the persuasions of advertising. But long-held views can be slow to change, and GE is using every tool it can to build awareness and support for its new strategy.
Investor-themed ad campaigns are usually short-lived and focused on a particular event. GE might be running its campaign now to underscore the transformational boost from the Alsthom deal. Such campaigns are mainly used by conglomerates, too, in an effort to narrow the share-price discount with their pure-play peers. (United Technologies – another diversified behemoth – had a high profile investor campaign several years ago.)
Only time till tell if the GE campaign will be effective. But it will be hard to move the stock price unless its business strategy pays off.