En studie om användandet av årsredovisningen i samband med marknadsföring

Sammanfattning: Our essay treats the use of the annual report when it comes to marketing. Today there are many different ways for companies to reach out with their different messages; the thing that caught our interest was if the annual report is such a way. The annual report is an external accounting report which task is to give information to interested parties of companies. The annual report can be used to examine if the company has followed and achieved their goals. In other words it’s an important source of information that can be found about a company, which different interested parties can take part of for analyze. In the annual reports of today the reader can get a clear picture about the enterprise of a company. Though a large part of the information in the annual report is voluntary and each company makes their own decision about how much they want to account, it is of great importance for the credibility of the information. Something that has contributed to this development is, among other things, the demand from interested parties of the companies. The purpose of this essay is to examine how important the use of the annual report is when it comes to marketing. To make this subject more interesting for the reader we have chosen to compare companies on the stock market with non stock market companies. We hope that the comparison can demonstrate if the companies market themselves to the interested parties through annual reports and in that case how much the two types of companies differ. Our research was of a qualitative nature, besides using information from literature we made nine telephone interviews and took part in one interview by e-mail. By using the results from the interviews and the information from the literature we answered the questions we approached and therefore accounted for the purpose of the essay. In our theory we have chosen to bring up the aspects that we think are important to considerate if you use the annual report as a marketing channel. One of these aspects is the layout of the annual report, which makes a big difference in making the report comprehensible for the reader. From our analysis we came to the conclusion that the non stock market companies will not account voluntary information in the same extension as the companies on the stock market. From our interviews we interpreted it as if the companies on the stock market had started to observe usage of the annual report as a marketing channel. But it is a long way to go before the companies see marketing as a natural part of the annual report.