This article was published in the Spring 2025 issue of 'Informed'', the quarterly journal of The Investor Relations Society.
The annual report is a particularly demanding and challenging piece of communication to produce. Its scale has grown with its scope. Over the last 20 years reports have become more complicated as communicators have had to accommodate increasing amounts of evidence-based information, constantly aware that change and greater complexity is always coming down the line.
What is the best way of describing the true value a company creates to investors and other stakeholders? And is the annual report the best place to do it?
Some say the annual report is the one document that brings together everything about an organisation. It is unique in that it provides the most detailed picture – a positive story that positions it clearly in the minds of stakeholders, precisely because it is backed by reasons to believe in the form of narrative, data and audit.
Many listed companies have viewed it this way. Perhaps that is why, to a large extent, and in response to legal and compliance changes, annual reports have become so complex. But some are now seeing the annual report as part of a broader communications strategy – one in which the content can be communicated across multiple channels.
Of course, it starts with understanding the audience, but the world seems to be dividing into two kinds of reporting. One where the annual report’s role is to be comprehensive, a builder of the brand, a teller of the whole story as well as a compliance document. The other, where its role is more about technical reporting compliance, with the brand building and storytelling being done across multiple channels.
The implications are striking. By being specific, rather than comprehensive, the annual report becomes a slimmed-down version of its former self, no Ozempic involved.
Annie Bissett, our best practice consultant says,
“Some of the FTSE 100 see their annual reports as part of a bigger ecosystem where content in the annual report links out to the website, and leaders, employees and customers do the storytelling, much of it on video, allowing a concise annual report to concentrate on reporting.”
Now, some companies are global organisations. They have large communications teams and many stakeholders. Smaller companies, with fewer resources, will continue to use the annual report as the major piece of their corporate communication.
But others have been saying for a while it’s time the annual report changed. In 2023, M&S chairman Archie Norman said the company was spending £100,000 mailing out annual reports to shareholders. He demonstrated his point by holding up a pile of 10 company reports, exclaiming he could “hardly lift it.”
The fact is, people get their information from all kinds of sources these days, almost all of which end up online, so only a few clicks away. And that mean everything has to join up. Companies have, to a large extent, lost control of their own story and in order to get it back they have to work harder to be consistent everywhere.
At Invicomm, we’re trying to help clients do just that. Our ‘Brand Armour’ audit is a tool that allows owners of annual reports and other corporate communications to take a look at what they’re doing and calibrate how well they’re doing it.
What it provides, in one straightforward concise report, is a snapshot of a company’s performance across a set of characteristics that every touchpoint feeds in to: purpose; messaging; identity; authenticity; consistency; and engagement. These can be applied to an annual report, but also across all corporate communications. Corporate communicators can then identify the areas in which they are performing and where to focus their efforts in order to better project their brand and defend their reputation.
The accepted ways of doing things over the last 20 years are being challenged as never before. But with change comes opportunity. It will be interesting to see how organisations of all sizes respond.
