Recently in an exhausting review of over 300 annual reports produced in the US, we have come to the conclusion that many of them fail to communicate the corporate message because they are at best unclear and worse still downright confusing.
Sure, many of them are things of beauty but where are the brains? Like most beautiful things they can get expensive ranging in price from 15,000 to 250,000 and sometimes even more – a lot of money for a printed piece that may not even be read by the intended audience.
Corporate missions fail to be communicated not because corporations don’t know what they need to say or how they should say it but because the designers they hire fail to understand the corporate message and consequently cloud the water with frivolous design and arcane context setting.
Coming from a news media background, we at Garcia Media view these beautiful yet superficial annual reports with a healthy dose of sceptisicsm. Why? Because we know just how difficult it is to really engage an audience using print in a media saturated world. Corporate audiences are overexposed information consumers just like all of us, and we are all learning to filter out more and more of the information that is ‘pushed’ on us regardless of how important the source of that information believes it to be. In the post-Enron corporate era, finding a more effective way to deliver messaging is the real challenge for corporate communicators today.
The solution? Annual reports need to be simpler, clearer and more direct. Companies will come closer to clarity by dispensing with the tired old depictions of ‘happy hand-out photos’ of staff and customers, overuse of mission statements and the purely decorative padding so prevalent in annual reports today. I’m not saying you should have a black and white text-only report – of course it should be beautiful. But your audiences want the skinny on your company, not a lot of window dressing.
The thing is there are real stories to be told in companies – stories that can best illustrate company policy and strategic direction. Many designers don’t identify them because they are consumed by creating a beautiful portfolio piece rather than producing a report that works hard for the company.
At Garcia Media, we have learned how to listen to and understand a company’s communications problems, putting practical messaging solutions first. We break through and communicate to the audience, getting the intended message across so the reader feels he has learned something worthwhile.
So, why not have the beauty and the brains?