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Most IR functions run the same way. The CEO and CFO say something in a board meeting or an earnings prep call, and IR repeats it to investors. Useful, necessary, and completely secondhand. If every word you bring into a room came from someone else first, what exactly are investors getting from you?
Sarah Willett, Head of IR and Corporate Strategy at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, has a name for that gap. She runs IR for a bottler operating across 31 markets and 90 factories, reporting directly to the CFO, and she's spent her whole career in retail and consumer goods before landing at one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. Her rule for the job: "IR's not just the megaphone but the microphone."
A megaphone amplifies someone else's words. A microphone means you have something of your own worth picking up.
Why relaying the message isn't enough
Willett is direct about the default failure mode. Throughout her career, she's wanted to build a suite of anecdotes and credibility in her own right, rather than just being the mouthpiece or the megaphone. The distinction matters because investors can tell the difference between an IRO who's fluent in what leadership said and one who's fluent in the business itself.
Collect firsthand material investors haven't seen
Willett gets material by going and seeing the business herself. She visits plants regularly, with two more on her schedule the week we spoke, one in Sydney and one in Jakarta. She photographs in-store activations wherever she travels, then uploads them into shared folders with her team "so we can show examples of what we're talking about and what we've actually seen ourselves and experienced." When she's meeting with sales traders at a London bank, she brings product samples for them to try.
She's not doing this to prep for one meeting. She keeps doing it, every time she's back in a market, so she always has something current to draw on.
The shelf-stocking story
The clearest example is the one Willett tells almost as an aside. During a recent flavor launch, she volunteered to spend two days merchandising and stocking shelves, just to see how much of the product was actually moving from the factory floor into stores. She was, in her words, "slightly bribed" with a branded hoodie for the trouble. But the point wasn't the hoodie, it was what she walked away with: "I had so many things that I could then talk about and reference in meetings that, again, it adds to that credibility bucket that I have."
Two days on a shop floor turned into material she could use in investor meetings for months afterward, material no competitor's IR team could produce secondhand.
Does firsthand material actually change how investors treat you?
Willett says yes, and cites the banks as a source of that feedback directly. "I'm told this by the banks as well, by the way, that feedback's very positive around my team. We will get lots and lots of meetings, whereas other companies wouldn't necessarily get as many meetings for just IR, because actually they know that we stay close to the business." Mark made the same observation from the outside, noting how unusual it is to hear an IRO reference specific campaigns and tangible, on-the-ground detail the way Willett does.
Why this episode is worth your time
Most advice on IR credibility is about polish: better decks, tighter messaging, more rehearsed answers. Willett's approach is closer to the opposite. She goes and gets something no one handed her, then brings it back, and by her own account, that habit is part of what got her role expanded into corporate strategy in the first place, a promotion that came as an unprompted phone call from her CFO, not a request she made. None of it requires a household-name brand or a 90-factory operation to copy. It requires deciding that repeating what you were told isn't the job, and going to find something worth saying instead.
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