Is there a connection between a business’ marketing strategy and their stock price? If so, then why, when the latter involves LGBT visibility do financial journalists feel uncomfortable reporting on it?
Rocco Pendola offers an opinion on the subject in a recent piece on TheStreet.com.
“When it comes to homosexuality, we would rather just ignore the issue, or deem it irrelevant, particularly in the cozy confines of the financial media. But if gay marriage can become a defining issue in a political campaign, how can we argue that a major corporation broaching the subject in its marketing will not, at some point, impact the business as well as the brand and, eventually, the stock?”
Pendola compares President Obama’s bolstering of support from the political left by endorsing marriage equality to JC Penney’s adoption of a lesbian spokeswoman and advertisements featuring same-sex parents as a means to strengthen their own low earnings.
The key difference being that the political media discusses the President’s opinions on LGBT rights, while business journalists appear to tiptoe around such actions. The same can be said for other companies making pro-gay moves, like Macy’s and DC Comics, or perhaps looking to smooth over recent dust-ups with the LGBT community, like Target.
If these companies are making overtures to the LGBT community to improve business, that’s news, and it should be reported as such. And so should how those overtures bear out in the long run.
Source: TheStreet.com
AshNYC
guessing here…..Finance is generally controlled by older, privileged, heterosexual, white males(i swear this isn’t REALLY about race), who aren’t too excited about giving any kind of power to any other group…..just a thought….
DouggSeven
These corporations painstakingly do plenty of marketing studies and concluded this angle to be beneficial. They are also in the business of profit. They don’t make errors. Simply put – ‘the times, they are a changing’.