CHANGING BEHAVIORS
I find a lot of the commentary on what we will have to do to achieve energy independence and to adjust to a time of scarcity to be misguided. Telling Americans they have to “sacrifice” and “conserve” sounds good, but is not sustainable over the long term.
On the contrary, finding ways in which to conserve energy or reduce spending that actually are perceived as beneficial to individuals is far more likely to succeed and be sustainable. Why does the “sacrifice” or “conserve” message not work?
- Telling anyone to sacrifice will inevitably create the potential for resentment and class warfare, because not everybody will choose to sacrifice equally. Those struggling to succeed will resent such a message because they believe they are already sacrificing.
- I believe that human beings can be in a deprivation mode only during the pendancy of a crisis. If oil prices decline and if their day-to-day situation gets better, they will stop sacrificing, and we will lose the ability to achieve energy independence.
- The wrong kinds of sacrifices will reduce the potential for economic growth and recovery.
So what is the alternative way to solve this problem? With respect to energy conservation, let’s find ways to make less energy usage a positive for Americans. In my testimony to the Connecticut Transportation Strategy Board, which is posted on my blog at www.mikecritelli.com, I make the following suggestions:
- Give more employees the ability to telecommute all or part of the time. This saves them significant commuting cost and hassle, and can increase their productivity by enabling them to use effective mobility tools to get their work done at home or at satellite locations.
- Make more events or activities at work “business casual” to reduce the cost of wardrobe acquisition and maintenance. Many workplaces are already five-day “business casual,” and Pitney Bowes made that decision 11 years ago. However, we can make more events less dressy over time. This may not help specific segments of the fashion industry in the short term, but they can recover over time by adapting to changed consumer demand.
- Shrink the workspaces of employees at work, but provide them with more amenities, such as more conference rooms, more access to light, more environmentally-friendly workspaces, and more common-area amenities, like kitchen areas and fitness spaces. We did that at our headquarters, reduced costs, and increased our employees’ satisfaction with their work spaces significantly.
- Offer services through the mail that individuals today have to access by taking non-work time. For example, give individuals the ability to vote by mail, to get permits and licenses they need by mail, to get more prescription and over-the-counter drugs by mail, and to get more purchased items delivered to them, rather than having them having to take valuable time looking for them.
- At the same time, as we increase delivery options, we should consolidate the number of delivery services that occupy our streets and consume energy and create traffic congestion. The U.S. Postal Service has recently become the carrier for FedEx, UPS, and DHL for residential deliveries in many geographic areas. There are many local delivery services that could consolidate their transportation capabilities and have shared services that would reduce their costs, increase convenience for consumers, and improve the environment.
- The Internet is a wonderful tool to enable individuals to learn who else is traveling somewhere or who has an item that can be borrowed or purchased at a lower cost in order to save resources and consumption. For example, I like the idea that Amazon.com is connecting book purchasers with people wanting to sell used books, instead of having a new book printed to satisfy a consumer’s need.
None of these ideas require individuals to “sacrifice” or “conserve” anything, but, cumulatively, they can produce significant energy savings, reduced cost, and improved consumer satisfaction. Government should be convening private sector innovators to employ some of these ideas and should let the private sector do what it can do best to make some of these ideas more widespread. As an employer, government should also be setting an example in some of these areas.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Stop sending unsolicited catalogs. That will cut back on wasteful energy consumption.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Until we have some idea what the behavioral response to the reduction of catalogs would be, we do not know whether we would save energy. What is the energy saving if a marketer stops sending a catalog, but posts color pages or even videos on the Internet, supplemented by blast spam e-mails? The data centers that store and transfer these images consume huge amounts of electricity, which is hugely wasteful. We also don’t know what consumer behavioral response would be. If one consumer drives to a retail store 10 mile away, instead of shopping via the mail from one of the 100 letters he or she receives, more energy is consumed.
If someone does not want to receive unsolicited catalogs, go to the DMA web site at http://www.the-dma.org/index.php
October 27th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Mike:
Until we are able to realize the global changes you are suggesting, isn’t it wise to cut back in ways that are available today?
Drive less, recycle, decline unwanted junk mail — each of these are ways individuals can make a positive difference today.
Don’t underestimate the appeal of sacrifice and conservation — humans thrive with a sense of purpose.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I agree with the spirit of your comment. I think the term “junk mail” is often inappropriately used, but I agree that, if an individual does not want to receive specific mail that he or she is getting, there should be, and there is, a way to stop receiving that mail. Look at the DMA web site.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
What type of testing would needed to predict the behavioral responses with reasonable accuracy, broken down by zip code or by other suitable segments? Is that type of testing something that Pitney Bowes would be willing to do, or that one of your business partners might do?
Those were all nice ideas described in your original entry above. It’s nifty that you were able to implement those changes at Pitney Bowes.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Thank you for your response. I am traveling, so I will elaborate on what I am suggesting when I get back home later in the week.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Thank you very much, and I look forward to learning more whenever you’re able to post again. I also appreciate that you took time to submit a comment at the other blog. I would like to continue a conversation with you over here, because when you’re writing in your own space (as opposed to the edited version at the NYT), it’s much more obvious that you have put a great deal of thought into these matters.
I believe that both systemic changes and personal sacrifice are important. I sincerely admire what you have done with the Pitney Bowes workspaces. I think changes like that are of tremendous value. At the same time, my husband and I actually have chosen to live a simpler and lower impact life. Our household greenhouse gas emissions are only 30-50 percent of the American average (depending on which calculator I use–it’s admittedly quite complex to figure). It doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, though. It feels like a healthier, saner, more grounded, and more secure way to live. Maybe that’s the key, in both the workplace and the home. If it feels easy, it is.
There’s a lot more I could say about my unhappy experiences with the DMA, both recently and as far back as the 90s. I could elaborate at length, as well, about my reasons for disliking catalogs even from places where I am already a loyal customer. I am now mostly self-directed as a consumer and am part of a segment who should probably not be marketed to, period, because it’s a waste of resources and an ongoing source of aggravation and misunderstanding for all parties. It seems to me like one of the most direct ways to handle this situation would be some sort of integration of the solutions provided by Pitney Bowes and of the third party services (one in particular) now heavily favored by consumers.
If you’ve already ruled out that possibility (I don’t want to make any assumptions, but because of your repeated recommendations for the DMA, it sort of sounds like you are not open to any other service), I would be most interested to hear what Pitney Bowes offers to marketers to help them discover and suppress mailings to people like me. We’re the people who used to like catalogs but no enjoy them, people who have become committed online shoppers and would feel no motivation to drive to a retail store just because a catalog has not arrived. (I do shop at some retail stores, for what it’s worth, but I walk.)
Safe travels.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I strongly believe that you and your husband should have a way of not receiving advertising mail or other commercial messages that you do not want to receive. If you think about screening mechanisms, there are spam filters for e-mail, TIVO systems for TV advertising, and the “Do Not Call” registry for telephone solicitations, as well as caller ID for phone calls. The DMA registry is, for now, the best tool, to get a comparable result.
Pitney Bowes does not have a significant presence in the mass saturation marketing mail business, except for a small portion of our Mail Services business that consolidates advertising mail from multiple customers and gets it to its destination faster and less expensively. We have much more of a stake in creating high-value mail. Our software businesses eliminate undeliverable and duplicative mail. Our Marketing Services businesses try to direct customers to do better targeting and data analysis to eliminate mailings to people who are unlikely to respond to them. Our mailing technology businesses give mailers who want to do targeted mail the tools to get it done.
All that being said, the postal rate structures actually encourage mass marketing mail, through no fault of the U.S. Postal Service. Bulk mail pricing is supposed to be matched to costs, which means that mail sent to every address in a community gets lower rates and lower overall costs than mail that is sent to 80% of the addresses. Thus, if a mailer were to cull out the recipients who might not want to receive a mailing, the mailer is penalized because the cost of sorting the mail and separating out the mail that is required to be suppressed is adding to the price of postage. We need a “green” rate that rewards selectively and penalizes mass, duplicative mailings, and we are working with the industry to give the Postal Service the operating freedom to put such a rate into effect. That will take some advocacy and some regulatory analysis, but there is a lot of momentum to getting this done.
Pitney Bowes is a strong believer in environmental stewardship and sustainability:
• Throughout our history, we have rented and leased equipment to customers, kept it in use as long as possible, and recovered it at the end of its useful life for proper disposition.
• Since 1979, we have provided a business service that obviates wasteful driving to and from post offices to transact business, through our Postage-by-Phone system.
• We have lobbied successfully for changes in postal regulations that have minimized wasteful shipments of postage meters back and forth from our customers, and have reduced resource consumption by changing features through software, rather than add-on parts and components to our machines.
• We have actively focused on reduced service calls, both by increased product reliability, and by solving service issues over the telephone.
• We have consolidated mail for the Postal Service and avoided significant resource consumption in moving mail inefficiently through the postal system.
• During my tenure as General Counsel, we reduced our hazardous emissions by 90% and took them to below reportable quantities.
Today, we are working actively with such organizations as The Rainforest Alliance, the World Environmental Fund, and the Forestry Stewardship Council to focus on reducing the environmental footprint of mail.
Most importantly, we support the principle that well-informed consumers should have the ability to make very granular choices as to what they want and don’t want to receive in the mail. For example, if you were to change your residence, we produce a move update service, both in paper form and online, that allows you to decide what catalogs you no longer want to receive. The online version also allows you to suppress magazine mailings to you.
Like you, I grew up with a set of values that caused me to live well below my means, and I believe that wastefulness has a moral dimension to it. I have tried during my tenure to get Pitney Bowes’ example of frugality and sustainability more broadly based in our industry. While I am pleased at our progress, much remains to be done.
November 5th, 2008 at 9:35 am
You’ve done a lot. Thanks for taking time to enlighten me.
November 8th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I have to wonder how good your (and others) Marketing Services really are. I haven’t purchased anything from a paper catalog in probably 10 years, yet I continue to receive completely irrelevant catalogs for products I have never purchased in my life (e.g. garden tools, hunting equipment, craft supplies). Add to that the multiple misspellings of my name and it feels like the direct marketing industry hasn’t made any progress towards better targeting of prospects in decades. It would be nice to see the print world catch up with the online world in permission marketing (CAN-SPAM, etc.) rather than making the recipient (who never asked for this junk) beg to be removed from DMA and other lists.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
I can appreciate your frustration about unsolicited mail that appears to have been unwelcome and of low quality. We do not participate in this part of the mailstream as a Marketing Services provider. If you want to be removed from mailing lists, you can go to DMAChoice.org. There are other organizations, such as Catalog Choice, whose web site you may also want to check. I do not support the conduct you describe, but I believe you have the best ability to stop unsolicited commercial mail coming into your home. It may take a few months for you to see the complete benefit of whatever you have communicated, but you will see a significant reduction in unsolicited mail.