BUILDING THE BRAND VALUE OF THE MAILSTREAM
One of my major areas of focus today is helping our industry define the brand value of the mailstream. The many attacks on the mail from environmental and privacy zealots are largely misguided, but they have more life than they should because they zero in on parts of the mailstream that diminish the value of our brand. I am a passionate environmentalist and a protector of privacy rights, but the “zealots” to whom I refer are those who advocate their positions inflexibly, ignoring facts that undercut their position, often attacking the motives of those who oppose them, and and also ignoring the consequences of what they advocate, even if those consequences are inconsistent with a clean environment and a strong protection for privacy. Not everyone who advocates a significant reduction of unsolicited mail is a zealot, but I believe many of the most vocal advocates who get the greatest media exposure would fit into this category.
When I note the size of our industry and the number of people employed in it, I do so solely to point out that the industry is important enough to make sure we get the brand issues right, not to say that we should always be as big as we are today or that we should defend every mailpiece and every job. In fact, we may need to see a reduction in certain kinds of mail and certain kinds of jobs to enable longer-term growth in mail and jobs.
So what do we need to do to defend this brand? Part of the effort is to promote what’s good about the mailstream: its vital role in helping people connect emotionally with one another through greeting cards and gifts sent through the mail, its role in transactional activity, its role in helping people market to one another and to fulfill transactional commitments through e-commerce, its role in connecting citizens with government, and its continuing role as an entertainment and educational medium. As Denny Hatch recently points out in his blog BusinessCommonSense, “because of junk mail, the United States Post Office is in business, reaching every address in America every business day.”
But the other part is to be brutally honest about what is bad about the medium, and to work actively to reduce or eliminate mail that diminishes the power of the brand. We cannot defend the indefensible, and we must be candid about what is indefensible.
- Mailpieces with legends on the outside of the envelope that identify the contents as “Official Communications,” when the content is a political fund-raising solicitation;
- Mailpieces knowingly and repeatedly addressed to deceased people;
- Mailpieces knowingly trying to market products and services to vulnerable populations. For example, many parents do not want credit card solicitations going directly to their children, and many loved ones do not want individuals with severe existing credit problems to continue to get credit card solicitations, but less reputable marketers ignore the recipient’s wishes.
By the way, some people would claim that saturation mailings, that is, mailings addressed to “resident” and mailed to everyone in a community, are indefensible. I have a different point of view. While some of us might not want to receive a newspaper-like mailpiece with dozens of coupons falling out of the newspaper when we pick it up, enough people in the community value the shopping ads and the coupons, that this type of mail has brand value. Requiring it to be more targeted would add so much cost that it would not available to lower-income citizens or to individuals who want to shop frugally for other reasons.
As I have said before, the “Do Not Mail” proponents are unfortunately playing upon citizen dissatisfaction with our industry’s slow response to mail recipient needs, but all the marketing research our industry has done for a long time indicates that Americans, as mail recipients, want a remote control device that gives them the ability to block certain channels, not one that offers them only an “on/off” switch
