The Annual Report: A Tool for Reputation Management? : An explorative Analysis

The annual report is the most important instrument of corporate reporting, aimed at a variety of important stakeholders and covering a wide range of topics. Given that corporate reputation is an aggregation of stakeholders' perceptions of a company over time, it can be argued that the annual report should play a significant role in a company's reputation management efforts. The study presented in this paper was aimed at identifying the congruence of companies' emphases in the preparation, design and publication of their annual reports and established drivers of corporate reputation. While reputation management does not appear to be an explicitly dominant objective of annual report design and publishing, corporate reputation drivers can be shown to be incorporated in most core aspects of this most important communication instrument.