Did You Know...

...that according to the buy-side, investor relations can have as much as a 25% impact on a company’s valuation? In our most recent study of the buy-side, we uncovered that portfolio managers and buy-side analysts attribute a premium of 10% of a company’s valuation to good investor communications and a discount of 15% to bad investor communications.

Our History

The Vision

Ardith ("Art") Rivel began his marketing research work in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in designing, marketing and conducting high-end, multi-sponsored market research programs. These projects were aimed at better understanding trends, attitudes and changing dynamics among various respondent groups in a variety of industries. Having gained a particular expertise on the perceptions and behavior of the investment community (portfolio managers and analysts), Art was able to develop the seminal Portfolio Manager Viewpoint series (a yearly survey of US institutional investors geared toward well-known, large-cap companies) which began in 1978 under his direction at Yankelovich, Skelly and White. When Art founded Rivel Research Group in 1991, he licensed, and eventually purchased, the rights to the Portfolio Manager Viewpoint series; a body of work that spanned over 25 years and was comprised of data from 33 studies.

Expanding to Focus on Individual Companies

Given the growth of the business, Art hired Jim Peebles in 1993, a former marketing research colleague from Yankelovich, to further develop the company's research programs. In addition to multi-sponsored work addressing broad-based communication and valuation issues within the financial community, Art and Jim perceived another unfilled niche in the marketplace in performing company-specific research for corporate clients. They applied disciplined marketing research procedures in researching a company's most influential investors and/or analysts. The creation of the Core Constituency Research service, with its mix of standardized and customized lines of inquiry, became the foundation for the only normative database of its kind in the market research industry. Rivel's normative database provides unparalleled context and comparability for its clients, having over 1,000 measurements of companies studied since 1995. To this day, Jim continues to oversee and provide direction to the firm's research initiatives.

A Bright Future

In 1994, Brian Rivel joined the company to learn directly from Art and to help manage the business. Brian continued to expand his role within the company, becoming the company's president in 2000.

Today, Rivel's work spans many industries and is used by a broad range of executives from boards of directors, to C-Suite executives, marketing teams and investor relations and corporate communications professionals.