How a company’s culture develops and grows is dependent, to a large extent, on how deeply inculcated its brand is in the minds of its employees. From the lowliest intern to each member of the C-level team, every employee needs to be fully bought into an organization’s vision and objectives. This allows the company to maximise the talents of all its members, while also aligning employees towards company goals.
To communicate a singular company vision, companies typically require the services of branding experts, who create communications materials that employees can refer back to, if they’re asked about where they work. These materials can be brochures, employee handbooks, or in some cases, audiovisual presentations (AVPs). To do this, companies frequently contract with a service production company to help with the development of the AVP; as a result, many AVPs look like Hollywood-produced short films. Some even have pyrotechnics or graphics built into them. But what is the value of these anyway?
Evocative and Immediate
Like many other forms of audiovisual media such as television and movies, AVPs have the benefit of being naturally and immediately informative, engaging multiple senses and faculties in their viewers. AVPs have long been used as teaching aids, and their success is due to the fact that they communicate using more than one sense: listening to a lecture, by comparison, engages the sense of sound, and not much else, in most cases.
But depending on how they’re produced, AVPs can go beyond the sensory and elicit emotional reactions in their viewers, in much the same way movies and TV shows do. As a result of evolution, we’ve learned to react not just intellectually, but emotionally and even physically to external stimuli.
Creating Value Through AVPs
Naturally, companies would wish to leverage this intellectual and emotional switch that humans all seem to have; highly motivated, highly engaged workers would result in overall company success. To produce and distribute an AVP that can do this, consider these tips:
Don’t overload your viewers with information
Companies would definitely want a platform on which they can broadcast their many achievements and successes. This is all well and good, but a corporate AVP may not be an appropriate medium for this; 10% year-on-year growth may sound great in the boardroom, but adding a statistic like this to an AVP could lead to the temptation to continue to follow suit with more statistics and numbers.
What’s more, these stats are not nearly as evocative as employees visibly moving up in the world as a result of exceptional company performance. Truly powerful culture-building AVPs have to leverage the emotional power of the medium, as well as its capacity to inform. If statistics are deemed necessary, select one or two that are most meaningful and truly representative of a company’s performance.
Flex your digital muscle
A truly savvy company should be able to communicate its corporate vision to as many people as efficiently as possible. These days, that means using the internet to distribute materials about oneself. Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo, and many other video hosting sites are available and can be posted to very conveniently.
Leveraging the internet in this way has a twofold benefit: on the one hand, this allows potential clients and customers to learn more about a company’s brand and culture. At the same time, potentially talented employees may become attracted to a company’s vision for itself, and may wish to share in that vision as a result.
