Category: Article

Should I Publish an Annual Report?Annual reports are not only beneficial to large, publicly traded corporations. Armed with an understanding of what an annual report can accomplish, small businesses stand to gain similar benefits by publishing annual reports of their own. As a small business owner, you may be wondering if you should publish an annual report for your business like the ones publicly traded corporations are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission to publish. You’ve likely seen them before: elegantly designed annual reports produced by major public corporations that contain financial information and interesting stories about people and events pertinent to the corporations and their industries. Annual reports are not, however, beneficial only to large, publicly traded corporations. Armed with an understanding of what an annual report can accomplish, small businesses stand to gain similar benefits by publishing annual reports of their own. The Purpose of Annual ReportsWhile publicly traded corporations are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission to publish an annual report, small businesses also may benefit from the practice of publishing an annual report. In addition to regulatory compliance, other reasons for publishing such a report include: Overview of recent financial performance. An annual report provides readers with a look at your business’s financial performance in the past year.Marketing and promotional use. A small business annual report can double as a marketing and promotional vehicle for your business, effectively reaching prospective customers as well as potential investors and creditors.Management strategy and goal setting. The business annual report lets owners and management take a step back and see the past year in a big picture perspective. This can provide invaluable information to assist in evaluating current strategies and formulating future goals.Building trust. Whether it’s prospective customers, suppliers, or employees—or potential creditors, or investors—a professionally designed annual report containing relevant and quality content has the ability to build the trust necessary to attract potential stakeholders to your business. What to Include in an Annual ReportSo you’ve decided you’re going to take your small business to the next level and put together an annual report. Should the annual report you publish contain the same type of information presented in the annual reports of much larger companies? And what are some common components of annual reports? Because the small business annual report is looking to gain the same benefits from publishing an annual report that publicly traded corporations do, one strategy for putting together a compelling annual report for your business is to examine the annual reports published by larger corporations. While there are certain components that are common to most annual reports, such as the presence of key financial statements, other components will vary from report to report. Here are some ideas to get you started: Financial statements. In order to provide annual report readers with key information about a business’s financial performance in the past year, annual reports include basic financial statements, such as a balance sheet, an income statement, and a cash flow statement. These financial reports help to give readers the data necessary to gauge the financial health and performance of your business. This is particularly important if your business is looking to obtain credit or attract investors.Recent business accomplishments. Annuals reports often highlight recent goals and milestones achieved by your business. Whether it’s reaching a distribution goal or attaining a marketing target, providing this kind of information in your annual report makes your business more appealing to current and potential stakeholders alike.Features about your people. The annual report is also a good place to shine a spotlight on the people working within your business. Stories about awards won by employees—and even positive human interest stories about key personnel—can help to enhance the overall picture of your business that an annual report provides to its readers.Creating an annual report also will provide a useful record of the growth and development of your small business over time. In addition to raising your company’s overall professionalism, an annual report can provide valuable insights not only to you but also to all of your business’s constituents: customers, investors, and employees alike. Whether your small business is producing an annual report for state compliance (where required) or you’re considering a more comprehensive form of annual reporting, involve appropriate financial and marketing professionals early in the process. You also use our service to assist with creating compliance-related documents, to give you greater peace of mind.

Packaging: the fifth P of Marketing Wil Lyons explains why what’s on the box can be just as important as what’s in the box. Depending upon which survey you read, at least 66% and perhaps as much as 80% of all grocery purchase decisions are made at the point of sale – right there in the aisle as you fill your trolley! Not that one buys four times more than originally intended (although a whole set of supermarket layout strategies are designed to help achieve that objective too!). These findings relate to brand selection. Thus you may plan to purchase sausages, tea and ice cream, but there’s a wide selection of each and four times out of five you’ll decide exactly which brands to put in the trolley only while in the shopping situation. You can probably relate to that if, like most people, you come out of the supermarket with rather more than you originally intended and if, like most people, you browse to a certain extent while shopping rather than rigidly sticking to a favourite brand of absolutely everything. One U.S. survey has shown that, on average, people spend 10 seconds viewing each product category and in that brief time only get to see some two thirds of the goods displayed in that category. So fully one third of what’s on the shelf does not even get noticed. Thus, after all that product development, all that media advertising, all that distribution and shelf positioning – most purchase decisions are made in that last few seconds. The customer’s hand hovers briefly, then picks. Mostly, it picks out the product that best projects from the shelf, standing out attractively from the surrounding clutter. Although more comprehensive marketing models have largely superceeded the well loved ‘Four P’s’ of marketing, they still strangely gloss over what always was and still remains arguably the most important P of all – Packaging, and specifically packaging design. On the face of it, such startling survey findings as those quoted above might be calculated to lead manufacturers, distributors and marketing companies to scale back a little on the enormous expenditures undertaken to differentiate their product through tweaking the recipes or product features. One might expect them to cut back on inordinately expensive advertising campaigns. Why not target the elusive half that doesn’t work for starters! Conscious that most purchase decisions are made in the final few seconds, a concerted effort to win the packaging endgame is indicated. While the aforementioned findings and similar ones from many surveys world-wide are quite well known, it has been my experience that, thanks to the scant attention paid to the power of packaging in marketing training and literature, most marketers and designers alike have a poorly formed view as to what constitutes effective packaging design. Intelligently conceived and well-executed packaging design is not just about art or aesthetics. Its primary function is to sell the product by means of visually communicating not just one ‘notice me’ message, but up to several distinct messages which range from statements about positioning and likely price to statements about quality, status, dietary considerations, environmental correctness and more. Intuitively, it is difficult to appreciate the capability of a simple piece of packaging to convey a complex set of messages in an instant. Due to the sophistication of the human eye, however, it is indeed possible to achieve this. At its simplest, you can look at a flat, two-dimensional representation of any object on paper and instantly ‘see’ the real world object. You can glance at a painting in an art gallery and have an instant gut reaction. If you look away immediately, even though you have only seen the painting for a second or two, you will be able to articulate not just one, but several reasons for your reaction. Subconsciously, the same process is at work as we fill the shopping trolley. In a sweeping glance we survey, say, the pre-packed cheeses. Sometimes we will know exactly what we want and will seek it out and select it. Mostly though, we like a bit of variety and will quickly scan what’s on offer – just whatever catches our eye. A brightly coloured generic or ‘own brand’ may catch the eye because it is designed to do so. It is also designed to suggest basic, processed, perhaps not of the highest quality, economy price. That’s fair enough and, if it suits your taste and pocket, go for it. Sometimes the marketing line associated with these products is that they can be sold cheaper because money is saved on packaging. Not so many customers believe that, or the competing brands would be wiped out. There are a lot of cheeses in that chiller cabinet and, if you don’t want the economy brand, you may spot another whose effective packaging design has managed to rise above the clutter and attract your attention. The quality wrapper in traditional looking ‘natural’ material, the upmarket name, classical design lines and labelling combine to say – at a glance – ‘quality product, natural, trustworthy company, suitable for putting out before guests, bio-degradable pack, expect to pay more!’ The ability to effectively achieve that immediate complex of signals through a piece of packaging design is a specialist niche skill within the graphic design field. Really good packaging designers are hard to come by. Once found, they are highly prized by customers who have discovered the difference good packaging design makes to their sales figures. There are important functional aspects attaching to packaging design. It should enable the customer to understand what the product is, how to use it, how it looks (when displayed at its most attractive of course!). It should possess appropriate functionality as a container, be it a cellophane wrapper, box, can, bag or bottle. Structural qualities may also be built into the packaging design in ways which can enhance brand equity and which, indeed, can harm brand equity if the design is poor. If a Coca Cola bottle

What is a brand story? A brand story is more than content and a narrative. The story goes beyond what’s written in the copy on a website, the text in a brochure or the presentation used to pitch to investors or customers.

Start as you mean to go on…The beginning of the year is a great time get organised and create a plan for success as a CEO or in a Marketing role. Have you looked at your brand collateral recently?

Printing Pantones as Spot Colours V as Process colours As a designer or as a marketing/brand manager, one of the most important decisions you must make is in regard to the colours that will be printed on your packaging piece.

Most professional designers prefer not to work on spec (unless they are desperate for work 🙂 They feel their portfolio should speak for itself.  They feel their portfolio should speak for itself. Times are tough.

Artefact Ltd – Email Marketing service There is a big difference between unsolicited ‘blanket bombed’ emails and permission based emails sent – where your customers and contact base expect