An IPO is a key event in a company's life for which the management needs to prepare itself adequately, much ahead of time. Promoters must take the opportunity to review the overall company strategies and understand besides its financial needs, also marketing needs towards the visibility in the business world which helps to increase company value that is essential at the time of pre-launch buzz. This is also necessary to attract investment and merchant bankers towards issue management.

Pre-IPO business and marketing activities will definitely help and add tremendous value to the promotional efforts of merchant bankers to influence the valuation of an IPO, its initial returns, the wealth gains of inside shareholders. The ability of an investment banker to marketing an IPO to retail investors is also important to issuers. Not just that, but the clarity, intensity, and consistency of the corporate strategy communication can be a signal to financial analysts and public investors at the time of an initial public offering (IPO).

Marketing help create firm shareholder value. Recent research on marketing–finance interface has shown that marketing spending (i.e., expenses in communications, market research, advertising, and other marketing efforts) matter financially before as well as at the time of IPO and also after firm stocks are traded publicly. But, above all SME owners, promoters must engage the services of the expert in SME domain. One who can understand the company now and where the company wants to go. What are the strengths of company, its products, promoters and market capturing till now. How to build capacity and how to increase the visibility of company as a brand or company owning a select known established product brands is also a key issue to deal well ahead of time before going Public.

World won't come to know about you, your products, your company. Your business associates like bankers, private investors, micro finance institutes, chartered accountants, legal advisors, department heads and others in compliance, your staff and their families, your vendors and suppliers, service providers in all areas and above all customers in past, present and future. All of them ought to know and you must do enough internal and external marketing to create goodwill of the company. You need a market strategy and a strong plan for VALUE CREATION in every activity you do in business now and hence forth. You must ask a professional and take his advice to do step by step activity.

The Myth

There is a myth that advertising in any form of mass media kind takes care of all. What advertisers will do? What they will create and what they will write? Who will brief them? How a PR portfolio will be created? How media strategy be evolved? How everyone will be informed about their task that will add value in the overall process of VALUE CREATION. This is not the subject of advertisers or any management consultant but only that of an expert and experienced marketing buff.

This article stress and ponders the issue of marketing slightly differently and in an innovative way. It addresses the value of marketing investments made by the promoters and owners a way ahead of time to attract investors and retain value of their investments when “marketing strategy first meets Dalal Street”—that is, at the time firm stocks first become traded publicly in the context of initial public offerings (IPOs).

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