Off the Meter

When you hear the name Pitney Bowes, as a marketer, your mind might immediately go to the mailbox — postage meters for big and small enterprises, direct mail solutions and the like. But for quite a while now, the company's offerings have gone beyond meters, letter sorters, mail feeders and shipping scales (although Pitney Bowes still offers those, of course).

And as its customers move more and more online, it is essential for Pitney Bowes to make them aware of solutions that can work in a digital world, like document processing, print stream management and the like. This, says Juanita James, the company's chief marketing and communications officer, is what the company is focusing its marketing communications strategy on.

“When there is a lot of external change, that's an exciting time for a company,” James said in an interview at the company's Stamford, CT, world headquarters, which overlooks Long Island Sound. “Our reputation has been closely aligned with mail and postage meters, so the challenge is to ramp up awareness of our other capabilities.”

After graduating from college, James, a Brooklyn native, worked for Time-Life Books for 20 years. There, she held a number of management roles in the publishing division, including president and CEO of the telemarketing subsidiary. She left Time to work for Bertelsmann's Doubleday book clubs as senior vice president of operations and joined Pitney Bowes in 1999, first working in human relations and then moving into the chief communications officer position in 2006. She added the chief marketing officer role to her portfolio in 2007.

“It was a great opportunity to align communications across the company,” she notes.

CHANNEL SHIFT

To market itself, Pitney Bowes still uses direct mail, teaming it with targeted print to drive prospects to landing pages on PitneyBowes.com. The company's small business segment sends out more than 50 million pieces of mail annually as part of a multichannel approach to acquiring new accounts for the home-office/small-office segment. At the corporate level, Pitney Bowes doesn't do a lot of direct mail.

“Direct mail in particular is still a critical piece,” James says. “But while mail will always be a part of who we are as a company, it is becoming a smaller part of the total portfolio of capabilities.”

Not surprisingly, there has been a moderate decline — single-digit percentages — in Pitney Bowes's direct mail volume in recent years, as use of online media increased. “It still is a big part of how we market ourselves as a company, but we're increasingly using other channels for retention,” James notes.

Of course, so is everyone else, which means less need for the traditional meters and mailing services that Pitney Bowes is perhaps best know for. But there is opportunity as the Web widens.

“As more people shop online, that has implications for another segment of mail,” James says. “While some aspects of mail are decreasing, others are increasing. For example, we provide the technology for the shipping solutions for Amazon.com and eBay — so what we're doing is taking our secure technologies and applying them in different ways.”

Another area of interest for Pitney is cross-border mail solutions. “As the world becomes more global, navigating commerce through different countries and customers becomes a question of logistics,” she adds.

Pitney Bowes targets a number of different vertical markets. The ones with the greatest potential right now include insurance, financial services, government globally (both local and federal) and retail.

Across all sectors in business-to-business, the biggest challenge right now isn't finding leads, but rather getting customers to loosen the purse strings.

“We need to reinstill confidence in the business market and get companies to invest in themselves and their customers,” James notes. “If everyone is in a hunker-down mode, it's a challenge to get them to experiment, invest in new solutions and try new processes.”

B-TO-B CHALLENGES

While prospecting is still essential, Pitney Bowes is putting a lot of focus on retaining and growing its existing customer base, 2 million strong globally. Of course, a constant challenge in B-to-B is finding the right contact within an organization — a factor sometimes made even more difficult thanks to the cutbacks of this current economic climate.

If a decision maker or key long-term contact leaves a company, you're not necessarily starting from the ground up, but there is work to do.

“It's really more a question of expanding their knowledge — if the relationship was with the director of operations, you need to expand that to the CIO or CFO.”

One challenge is getting the various divisions of each customer to talk to each other internally.

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