ing his appointment as chief executive, the popular magazine Management
Todayhad made the following observations about the company:
The overblown publicity that tends to surround every move made by Fisons
belies its actual size. In the past, public interest in Britain’s first fertiliser pro-
ducer may have been simply a function of an active in-house PR department;
but it may also have had something to do with how the company saw itself.
One analyst suggests that one of Fisons’ historic problems has been that it
has always tried to be a big company in its chosen activities, sometimes when
there was call for a lower-key approach.^4A lower-key approach was exactly what Kerridge adopted, with the inter-
nal corporate PR department becoming an early casualty of the cost cuts.
In a subsequent interview for the Financial Times, Kerridge explained the
rationale behind its closure.^5 He believed that while the expense of divi-
sional public relations departments – dealing with divisional product pub-
licity – could be justified because of their ‘expertise, the experience and the
repetition of work’, a corporate public relations department could not.
Corporate PR could be contracted in when needed. He therefore looked to
an agency to develop a clear corporate image of Fisons.
The agency would advise on the best approach to adopt when announc-
ing financial results, takeovers and other matters, thus preventing what he
described as ‘inaccurate slants’ from emerging. An important facet of PR,
he felt, was that it should help to create an image of the company in which
personalities were unimportant, ‘I want to reach a stage where Fisons’
image is such that chief executives can come and go and you don’t notice
the change,’ he explained.
By the mid-1980s, memories of Fisons the failed fertilizer business were
fading, and a small, low-key, in-house Corporate Affairs Department was
re-established. Kerridge and Thomas met with the company’s most
important institutional investors once or twice a year, but the appoint-
ment of Peter Woods to the post of Director of Corporate Affairs in
September 1989 improved the flow of information to other sections of the
City. Woods, himself a City insider (formerly director of Health Care
Research at Warburg Securities), cultivated links with a select handful of
key analysts, with whom he met on a regular basis. Efforts were also made
to strengthen what had become an arms’-length relationship with the
financial press.
Nevertheless, Fisons remained noticeably less communicative than most
of its pharmaceutical competitors. Unlike Glaxo, Smithkline Beecham and
Wellcome – who communicated assiduously with the City – the senior
management of Fisons did not give regular presentations to analysts. Field
trips to the sites were not permitted, and there was no access to divisional
or operations management. The company consistently declined to release
The referral and influence market domains 271