The Annual Report as a Public Relations Tool in Three Industries

Though their roots reach back for centuries, both public relations and the corporation annual report have reached semi-maturity only during the present century. Business public relations began with the reaction of the first customer to the goods, services, and personality of the first man who offered some commodity—the ham of a squirrel, a live coal, a stone spear—for sale or barter. Everyone has business public relations of some sort, and even those modern companies which still disdain any formal public relations cannot escape the fact that daily they produce some sort of relations reaction in dealing with their segment of the public. As for corporation annual reports, they go back to the time the first corporation totaled its receipts and expenditures at the end of the first year and told its stockholders that they had lost or made so much money. From those beginnings have developed a public relations field that is today a professional science, albeit somewhat ambiguous, and corporation annual reports that rival the sleek magazines in budget requirements, circulation, attention-getting features, and the worry and labor of the staff which prepares them.