The new board of directors of tradition-steeped insurance company Merkur from Austria has opened a new chapter in the company history by implementing a corporate culture of partnership and collaboration of equal partners in 2014, giving the company a new style, or a “new handwriting” as a German phrase goes. The concept of the annual report takes the notion of a “new handwriting” literally: all 176 pages of the report were written by hand by the people who wrote success story of the year 2014.

All 176 pages of the report were written by hand – letter by letter, figure by figure, table by table – by the company staff ranging from doorman to CEO and assistants. Even the photos were drawn by hand. Handwritten by those people who actually had contributed to the success story of the year 2014, the idea of handmade craftsmanship is taken up and continued in the tactile experience of the book, featuring an elaborate technique with an open spine, which was hand-sewn by the company’s local bookbinder. The discreet design adds only one single colour, the house colour green, for subtle highlights, in order to dedicate the stage to the newly incorporated sense of group identity, expressed in each single letter.

The annual report was presented during a press conference. After the event journalists and employees alike ordered hundreds of copies. The first edition of 1.500 copies was out of stock within three days. 20 newspapers and their web sites reported, so did 12 magazines and 7 TV-stations.

• Internal impact: An internal survey after the process of writing and publishing the annual report showed that the identification of employees with the company was raised by 37 %.

• External impact: The attitude of the public could be shifted from 13 % of “somewhat positive“; to over 22 % and of 24 % of “quite positive“ to over 37 %, “quite negative“ went down from 5 % to 0,2 %. Key message penetration was at 74,1 % in the targeted groups after the communication process.

The Merkur website traffic grew by over 58 % right after the publication and its coverage.