It's happening like clockwork. With each Tour de France, the U.S. Postal Service comes in for a pasting for its more than $25 million sponsorship of the Lance Armstrong bicycle team. What, the press and others ask, is the USPS doing spending money on a bicycle team that competes mostly in Europe? The postal service's answer invariably is the same: “To advertise.”
My purpose here is not to judge whether the team sponsorship is a good use of rate payers' money, but surely those in our industry understand the value of advertising and marketing as part of doing business. Anyone with a keen eye for periodical or direct mail advertising should have noted a campaign the USPS has under way to whet small businesses' appetite for mail as an advertising and marketing medium.
Two facets of this new effort are particularly noteworthy. One is that the USPS plainly has the ethnic diversity of the small business community clearly in sight. It's taken steps to tailor and distribute its pro-direct mail campaign to the attention of Hispanic, Asian and African-American entrepreneurs. It seems the postal service has finally caught on to the fact that “Thar's gold in them thar hills,” and it's going after it.
The other facet has to do with the simplicity of the message it's trying to convey. All too often mail promotional efforts are littered with direct mail jargon — all that stuff about “presort,” “barcoding” and “address hygiene.” The kind of stuff that could make a small businessperson's eyes glaze over and opt for the “simplicity” of doing their prospecting through other media.
The postal service has come out with a number of very simply written pieces (Simple Formulas) that convey the same information without making the message a mind-numbing experience. While they aren't so detailed as to provide anyone interested in direct mail with a road map for conducting a mail campaign, the messages provide enough to prompt an interested businessperson to learn more. It's the old “Get 'em to nibble at the bait…then hook 'em and reel 'em in” kind of approach.
It's nice to see that customers include other than the top 10 national accounts. The postal service may not have been hitting home runs lately with some of its advertising efforts, but maybe Simple Formulas will provide it with a way to start hitting a few singles.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
