Branding IR/ON

In the fall of 2007, we received a call from sisters Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne, who both left their corporate jobs to open a gourmet cupcake shop in Washington DC: Georgetown Cupcake. The sisters needed a logo that projected an elegant and upscale brand identity for use on the shop awning, menu, merchandise and other materials. Several logo concepts were developed and quickly narrowed to the final design which included three icons – graphic representations of their signature cupcake frosting decoration.

We’re pretty excited about a first-ever event in Boston called Future M, focused on “what’s new and what’s next in Marketing.”  The week-long event is taking place at locations throughout the city – including the newly spiffed up offices at Weymouth Design.

As I was building this fence around a small veggie garden on the Cape to keep the rabbits and deer out, I got to thinking about how similar it was to building a website.

NIRI Boston recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with “a walk through the decades” at its celebration at the State Room in Boston. For some reason -the hair? the music? - we helped them celebrate the 80s with a display of IR communications in that pre-Twitter, pre-mobile and, dare we say, pre-Internet age

Mergers and acquisition are certainly nothing new in the world of biotech.  As communicators we recognize that clarity and thoughtfulness of communication before, during and after a merger or acquisition are essential to successful integration. For small, publicly traded companies, the corporate website, investor presentation and annual report are key vehicles to “get the story out,” particularly in the wake of M&A or strategic shifts in the business. ViroPharma.com is an example of a recent corporate website redesign, driven in part by the acquisition of Lev Pharmaceuticals, that gets the new ViroPharma story out effectively.

In a recent Graphis article, Doug  Oliver of Douglas Oliver Design
makes the point that the AR designer is not simply a print designer,
but someone who “sees the big picture, and that’s vitally important
when it comes to successful messaging, regardless of whether it plays
in print or on the web.”

Around this time every year we get a well-produced hardcover book that highlights the top 100 annual reports of the past year.  It’s great to thumb through - see how our work compares to the top talent, see some really smart design and writing, see the value of well-done print work, both the work celebrated and the Graphis book itself. It’s inspirational.  It’s newly printed, and smells good.

For six years we have been tracking annual report trends of the 15 “most admired companies” as rated by Fortune Magazine. The annual study looks at print and online formats. The majority of the sample have demonstrated continuity in printed presentation over time while while online formats have evolved significantly.

Every year the National Investor Relations Institute runs biannual events targeted at new IR professionals. Weymouth Design exhibited September 20-23 at the NIRI event in Boston covering the fundamentals of IR, including marketing, communication, and finance. Over 110 delegates, 23 speakers, and 10 exhibitors participated.

There are essentially two successful video formats for a CEO to talk to shareholders in an online report: eyes on the camera and an interview format. The eyes-on-the-camera approach can be quite powerful if done properly, primarily because the CEO is talking directly to the viewer just as he or she would in a normal conversation.