Forever Yours: Stamps, the US Postal Service, and brilliant (not stupid) marketing
Posted by KevinE at 5/29/2008 6:49 AM and is filed under uncategorized 
I avoid visiting my local Post Office at all costs. The employees embody all the classic civil-service “you can’t possibly get me fired” stereotypes – they’re rude, surly, unhelpful, and sometimes downright abusive.
All that said, I am actually quite impressed by the Postal Service as an overall entity. They quietly run a great online site, deliver my mail and packages anywhere in the world for reasonable rates, generally quickly, and often unharmed (far more often than UPS or FedEx!).
But I’m super-impressed by one of the most brilliant marketing ploys they’ve created in recent memory: the “Forever” stamp.
The Forever stamp is, as its name implies, a first class postage stamp purchasable at today’s rates, good for forever. As in, always. No matter what the rates rise to be. Write some first-class mail, put a Forever stamp that you bought for $0.41 on it when the cost of mail has risen to $5 per envelope, and the USPS says they’ll still deliver your letter.
Post Office vending machines ran out of these stamps faster than the workers could restock. (Well, ok, that’s hardly a comment on the demand vs the suppliers… but you get the idea).
Really. Swarms of people pumped millions of dollars in cash into the USPS to get stamps.
So why is this brilliant marketing?
Because, to borrow one of the great phrases of business blogger and skeptic David Cowan, it’s a scheme. The USPS gets a lot of cash now, which it can use or invest, -and- the USPS eases the task of transitioning to the new postal rates (fewer temporary and $0.01 stamps to be processed). The purchasers of the stamps, on the other hand, get a minimal discount – as they’re buying stamps (rate of interest: whatever the USPS dictates as they raise stamp prices) instead of keeping the cash (rate of interest: loosely tied to the Federal Reserve)
Similar schemes are in place in many places – from retail stores offering the “convenience” of automated checkout, to the existence of ATMs, to “paperless” billing statements and automated checking account debits.
So what’s the marketing moral of it all?
Carrots work better than sticks to motivate customers. If you want people to do something for your benefit, it helps to market what you’re proposing as something that will bring them benefit.
Then stand back, and let people beg you to let them do what you wanted them to do in the first place.
All that said, I am actually quite impressed by the Postal Service as an overall entity. They quietly run a great online site, deliver my mail and packages anywhere in the world for reasonable rates, generally quickly, and often unharmed (far more often than UPS or FedEx!).
But I’m super-impressed by one of the most brilliant marketing ploys they’ve created in recent memory: the “Forever” stamp.
The Forever stamp is, as its name implies, a first class postage stamp purchasable at today’s rates, good for forever. As in, always. No matter what the rates rise to be. Write some first-class mail, put a Forever stamp that you bought for $0.41 on it when the cost of mail has risen to $5 per envelope, and the USPS says they’ll still deliver your letter.
Post Office vending machines ran out of these stamps faster than the workers could restock. (Well, ok, that’s hardly a comment on the demand vs the suppliers… but you get the idea).
Really. Swarms of people pumped millions of dollars in cash into the USPS to get stamps.
So why is this brilliant marketing?
Because, to borrow one of the great phrases of business blogger and skeptic David Cowan, it’s a scheme. The USPS gets a lot of cash now, which it can use or invest, -and- the USPS eases the task of transitioning to the new postal rates (fewer temporary and $0.01 stamps to be processed). The purchasers of the stamps, on the other hand, get a minimal discount – as they’re buying stamps (rate of interest: whatever the USPS dictates as they raise stamp prices) instead of keeping the cash (rate of interest: loosely tied to the Federal Reserve)
Similar schemes are in place in many places – from retail stores offering the “convenience” of automated checkout, to the existence of ATMs, to “paperless” billing statements and automated checking account debits.
So what’s the marketing moral of it all?
Carrots work better than sticks to motivate customers. If you want people to do something for your benefit, it helps to market what you’re proposing as something that will bring them benefit.
Then stand back, and let people beg you to let them do what you wanted them to do in the first place.
Download | Duration: 00:03:23
Missed opportunity. I once asked our postmaster to rent a PO Box, but have mail forwarded for delivery to my home address (thinking of privacy and security). The reply was simple: "Of course not, we can't offer that, too many people would to do this."
Reply to this