Across 952 CPG CEO letters, shareholder language fell −27% from 2016 to 2025. I ran the same word families over 2,596 earnings-call transcripts. On calls, it rose +26%.
Shareholder-family language: 185.2 mentions per 100k words in 2016, 135.9 in 2025 — down −27%. The share of letters using it at all fell from 76% to 65%. Hover the bars.
The identical word families over 2,596 earnings calls: 26.5 to 33.5 per 100k — up +26%. The share of calls mentioning shareholders rose from 54% to 65%. Toggle the view.
Fixed panel: the same 63 companies, five or more transcripts each spanning six-plus years — 1,617 calls. Shareholder language there rose 26.9 to 38.3 per 100k. That’s +42% within the same companies.
Consumer + shopper language rose +46% on calls (129.5 to 188.9 per 100k). But the median call already mentions consumers ~4× as often as shareholders — letters only just reached 2×. The letter trend looks like convergence toward how execs already talk on calls.
Retailer language fell in both genres (−24% calls, −60% letters) while partner rose in both (+49% calls, +58% letters). Marketing fell in both (−13%, −35%). That’s a company-wide shift. The shareholder divergence is a genre story: the letter is the owned narrative; the call’s audience is literally investors and analysts.
One stat or one quote per card — built to be screenshotted straight into a deck or a post.
“At the same time, we will stay fully committed to our mission of returning value to our shareholders, evidenced by $1.2 billion in dividends we paid this quarter, as well as today’s announcement of a $400 million share repurchase program.”
Every quote below is verbatim from a published 2025 earnings-call transcript in the corpus. No paraphrasing.
“And importantly, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to returning value to our shareholders.”
“We returned $175 million to shareholders through dividends, which our board increased to a quarterly rate of $0.50 per Class A share, reinforcing our commitment to shareholder returns.”
“You guys know our first strategy here at KDP is a consumer-obsessed brand builders.”
“We are a business of 160 years, and I think we really, really are focused on consumer needs, and we have been an entrepreneurial company for a very long time.”
“Our innovation agenda supports our overall growth strategy by focusing on understanding and anticipating consumer needs.”
I keep a corpus of CPG earnings-call transcripts: 2,596 in scope, fiscal 2016–2025, 152 companies — from published transcripts (Motley Fool, StockAnalysis, roic.ai). The sweep ran on 2,592 of them; 4 files failed to re-read and were excluded. It grew from 72 calls / 475k words in 2016 to 311 calls / 2.1M words in 2025. Alongside it sit 952 cleaned CEO/shareholder letters from the same years.
I counted the same term families with the same regexes in both: shareholder (shareholder/stockholder/shareowner), consumer + shopper, customer, retailer, buyer, partner, trade, distributor, account, brand, marketing. Transcript harvest headers were stripped before counting — company names like “Prestige Consumer Healthcare” would otherwise inflate consumer counts — and letters had equivalent cleaning. Both use the same [A-Za-z']+ word tokenizer. Densities are per 100,000 words.
Four honest limits. One: shareholder mentions on calls skew toward formulaic capital-allocation sentences — dividends and buybacks — boilerplate-adjacent, unlike letters’ named-audience framing. The genre difference is partly a genre difference. Two: 2021–2025 on calls: shareholder +42%, consumer −3% — the recent move is all shareholder-side. Three: no language filter on calls (letters excluded ~113 non-English) — a small number of translated Japanese/European transcripts are included. Four: this is a language measure, not a spending measure. It records who execs name as the audience, not where dollars went.
My read, and I’ll own it: the shareholder didn’t leave the company — the shareholder left the letter. The letter is the owned narrative; the call’s audience is literally investors and analysts, and on that stage execs still open with “returning value to our shareholders.” If the shareholder is out of the letter, the interesting question is who the letter is for now.