Investor relations may be obscure, but in modern business they are increasingly important

Perhaps the most illuminating nugget in Terry Smith’s fusillade against Unilever the other day was the description of his relationship with the food and toiletries group’s investor relations department. The Fundsmith boss, while lamenting the underwhelming Unilever share price record and the company’s distracting obsession with what he regarded as woke nonsense, also revealed something else that was bugging him: “Against the background of this miserable performance, the company did not even attempt to contact us for the first eight years [2010-18] we were shareholders,” he wrote. “We have always assumed that one job of the investor relations team was to keep in touch with the largest shareholders and especially one with the characteristics of Fundsmith — a long-term investor who has never sold a