Trust, look, who!

Comment by the Editor-in-Chief | Johannes Frederik Christensen

The Business of Brand Management sheds light on brand management in the context of the present and history. This article is part of a series of republications of selected texts by Olaf Leu and Bodo Rieger from the years 1987 to 2018. What was thought, written and advocated back then is worth re-reading - not out of nostalgia, but because it reflects questions that have not been resolved even today.

Establishment, development, completion and dismantling of value standards in the annual report

Let's start with a look back: in 1983, the industry magazine published by Süddeutscher Verlag in Munich announced the "Best Annual Report" competition. Winfried Wilhelm, editor-in-chief and initiator of the competition, was first and foremost an investigative and practicing business journalist. He recognized that the annual report, a mandatory annual publication , was a medium of corporate communication that had previously been little perceived by the public as the main message of a company.

A competition should change that.

The basic idea: the annual report, which was the only analog medium in those years, was the only species within all communication measures that could be evaluated at all, as it was mandatory for companies and was therefore public and fully documented. No competition can boast this consistency of just one species . There was no voluntary participation here; it was an unfriendly takeover. This initial and evaluation situation is unique .

The subsequent start-up phase can therefore be observed with an initially cautious, more tentative approach to the subject of financial communication. Invited as experts in this field - the jurors - consisted of financial, business and advertising experts who took a lot of time to analyze the submitted material, especially the content, rather than the design, and thus laid the initial foundations for subsequent benchmarks.

Industriemagazin was transformed into Top Business and Winfried Wilhelm, the previous editor-in-chief, came to manager magazin in Hamburg in 1987 with his "competition experience" as deputy editor-in-chief. And he promptly continued what he had already initiated in Munich in 1983: the "Best Annual Report" competition. The first one took place in 1995. Then, in 1996, the decisive change to everything that had gone before took place:

Winfried Wilhelm called for the evaluation not only of content, but also of language and design.

The idea: values and the standards derived from them can only be determined on a scientific basis , which includes comprehensible criteria that a jury had to "work out" in a time-consuming process lasting several months. Here, it is not enough to "take a quick look at the object", but careful detailed work must be carried out. From 1996, the scientific institutions in Münster, Düsseldorf and Mainz were commissioned to do this.

After all, according to Winfried Wilhelm's specifications, an annual report could only be seen as credible in the eyes and hands of a shareholder if it was presented in this way and no other. In the 1990s, the competition was also on the move with the same intention, Capital from Cologne. For a few years, two trains were running on the same route. It was then very quickly realized that this "competitive situation" with the same clients but different results would damage the credibility outside. And so it was. And it is very probably thanks to Winfried Wilhelm that Capital refrained from launching its own competition on the same track - meaning that manager magazin then had the sole monopoly on competition.

manager magazin drove the competition and the associated criteria within the individual evaluation segments to a brilliant climax. From 1999 to 2005, three university institutions - Münster, Düsseldorf and Hamburg - were responsible for content-related criteria, while Mainz University of Applied Sciences, followed by Münster University of Applied Sciences from 2004, was responsible fordesign-related criteria.

The participating companies, or those forced to participate, increasingly recognized the beginning and maintenance of value standards in the excellent analysis of the evaluators, which was always appropriate to the time and situation. A yardstick had been created against which they could measure themselves - or were "gently" forced to do so by the published ranking.

In 2006, what can be described as a gradual dismantling of everything that had previously been achieved began. The Financial Communication assessment segment, managed by the University of Hamburg, was dropped, followed in 2012 by the Language segment, managed by the University of Düsseldorf. 2013 was also the last year of the Design segment, which had been managed by Münster University of Applied Sciences from 2004 to 2013, following Mainz University of Applied Sciences. This meant that three assessment segments - Financial Communication, Language and Design - were no longer included, dismantling the former central idea of "a scientifically developed overall package".

In 2014, "Der beste Geschäftsbericht" was transformed into Investors' Darling and also featured a new academic institution, the Leipzig Graduate School of Management, which was responsible exclusively for the content in all its facets. This did not leave the abruptly "replaced father of the balance sheet audit", Prof. Baetge, in peace, and under the old title "The Best Annual Report", the university institution in Münster then presenteda similarly academically compiled result in2016, two years later, with content alone as the criterion. In the Springer supplement "der Welt", the magazine Bilanz, a corresponding medium was found that reached the public.

This meant that two trains were once again running on the same track, just like with Capital.

These two "organizers" pursued only one criterion, the content. They did not, however, apply the once recognized, documented and proven, publicly respected and all-encompassing standards of value. What took place was what could be described as reduction, or more strictly, neglect. Companies that had gradually become accustomed to and more or less accepted generalist values were suddenly left out in the cold. As a result, a dismantling of once proud corporate communications can increasingly be observed on a broad front. People feel increasingly unobserved, left alone, and in turn - eyes closed and through - go it alone in the clutches of often dilettante consultants and the result of organized pitches, which usually resemble the chances of winning and the quality of a shell game.

An unsightly development. This is now continuing in the situation of two competitions, that of manager magazin and Bilanz. Both publish "their" results, but the published rankings are very different . And they only apply to the content, albeit in all its facets.

The language, the design are not taken into account.

The result is what is known in the industry as a semi-finished product . A yardstick for the whole is not created in this way, and cannot be created in this way. As a result, credibility suffers and with it the medium of the annual report, whose initial visionary development was abruptly halted. The only positive factor here is that the review and subsequent publication is cost-neutral - in contrast to all kinds of competitions that have only one goal: to fill their own coffers with submission fees and subsequent publication fees. The companies involved, because they are willing to pay, are awarded bizarre-looking dust catchers as trophies and precious metal awards as supposed proof of exuberant creativity for the newsletter and the sideboard. This includes a public event with champagne and an elaborate paper ham, called documentation. It's a win-win situation: Euros satisfy vanity. Values and standards cannot be created in this way.

There were times when "the media" were more or less well-functioning filters that obeyed rules, both generally accepted and self-imposed. It went without saying that factual claims had to be substantiated, facts had to be verifiable, there had to be sources for quotes and, in the case of controversial topics, the opposing opinion at least had to be heard. If society wants to remain rational and expect answers to all the problems raised here, it needs rules, it needs filters, it needs standards, it needs them to be checked - and in the background it needs the philosophical ideal of truth and a practical passion for reality.

EPILOG to the article "Trust, look, who", September 02, 2025

In the end, nobody wanted it to be them, but this mysterious virus on the Internet was too tempting. This is how the big system change from paper to the illuminated disk on the PC came about. Until 2013, the analog, printed annual report was still a construct of the senses, and the graphic arts industry once again showed off all its skills - the effects of the sense of touch for paper structures such as punching, embossing, varnishing and foil lamination. This resulted in "annual editions" from companies that were able to create - or not - their very own culture of communication, the attempted bond with stakeholders and shareholders. Especially nowadays, there are calls to do more for "the values", the special features of a company, to make them more recognizable, to make them more "emotional". And on the Internet? Feelings, a sense of touch? In the newsletter of the perceptive Wolfgang Beinert from Berlin, one finds a concluding comment on this: "Animations, i-dots that blink, tick and turn are no substitute for good design. Not to mention convincing concepts and informative texts".