Having saddled his warhorse and belted on his sharpest words, James went on to replying to our post on whether AR managers should fill in briefing forms. Incidentally, he dropped hints on what information analysts expect from a briefing in his reply:
- Researching Is Their Job, Not Yours: On Analyst Relations [Monkchips]
Thanks for the reminder James, it's always useful.
It is indeed the AR professional's role to make sure the content is tailored to analyst needs and to help shaping it. Some, typically those working for smaller ones, put the content together and brief the analysts themselves. Those employed by larger corporations often don't have the time to do this or cover too many product lines / business areas to do this. In any cases a good briefing is tailored to the analyst's research agenda.
We can't agree more with James that this should result in a two way street. As a side note, it tends to be more to the credit of independent / boutique analysts such as Redmonk, MWD, Freeform and others to always bring great insight into the conversations.
On the other side, what we can't stand is sloppy analysts who don't even bother checking our corporate websites and send you long and redundant questionnaires to fill in. To those, we'll re-iterate that AR Managers are not your personal secretary. Nor do we expect to do the work and still have to buy the end product! Admittedly they're not real analysts, rather market research companies and we're sure that Redmonk would never do this! Dom and Duncan's abounded in the same direction -read their comments on the original post from David. Names? Frost & Sullivan, ARC, PAC, Butler... Any other nominations for the briefing questionnaires hall of shame?
The final word must go to Ian Skerrett for his comment on James' post. The idea of an email address for briefing requests is so 1990's though. What Redmonk should consider is a briefing requests blog :-)
