According to Jean Paul Bailly, diversification is rule number one because, eight years ago, mail was profitable and now it is not. In fact, mail volumes continue to drop at a very fast clip. Naturally, being the third largest bank in France, and being dominant in parcel and express traffic, they are able to follow what he called ‘Rule Number 1’: Never sacrifice profit margins.

Among the innovative ideas he mentioned was exploring acting as an outsource service-provider to La Poste customers. This idea was also mentioned by Kee-Doek Kim, the director general of Korean Post, who mentioned becoming the small appliance repair depot for small manufacturers, a role UPS plays for Toshiba in the US.

Bailly also mentioned leveraging the trust of the posts into the e-commerce world and to ‘master dematerialising and rematerialising’. These were concepts shared by many speakers. Clearly, hybrid mail or electronic mailboxes would fall into this category. This was a strategy later discussed by Adrian Humbel of Swiss Post. Humbel mentioned the concept of hybrid mail postal certification being built onto Outlook. This, and other certification tools under development, would enable customers to provide a positive identity of themselves and their companies through this post-connected product. This leverages the trust the public indeed does have for the unique capabilities of the posts in establishing positive identification of individuals.

The theme of creating value in a time of change was a consistent one. Surprisingly, a number of speakers asserted that the future of direct mail was a bright one. Dirk Palder, of CapGemini, speaking about innovation management, predicted that within ten years, the posts would for the first time in 450 years engage in a relaunch of the letter as a postal product. This would come about through a convergence of the post and the digital world. For this to be successful, the letter and the postal service must be reorientated toward the receiver and not the transmitter and the post would be paid for performance and not by distance.  

In short, part of this revolution would involve reinstating receiver pays because they want to receive mail. Rather than having a default as postal delivery, the default would be electronic post with paper mail being a pay-to-receive service.

Continuing the theme that direct mail had a future, Gary Larson of the Mail Media Centre of Royal Mail outlined his belief that direct mail could become much more widely used. Royal Mail has developed a plan to address one of the major barriers to more widespread use of direct mail in the UK, that being the fact that its agencies don’t get paid a commission on mailing letters, although they do when placing advertising in nearly any other medium. He outlined an aggressive and comprehensive programme to develop a solution to that problem.

Talking about trust

A common theme with many speakers was that of trust. James Roper, of Interactive Media in Retail Group, also pointed out that the predicted increases in parcel traffic arising from e-commerce, would not come about unless consumers tusted merchants.  

He predicted that 15 per cent of consumer retail purchases will be delivered to purchasers away from stores. Research shows that 18 per cent of retail purchases in the UK are now made online and some 40 per cent of all retail sales are ‘influenced’ by the Internet. To support this trend, IMRG is supporting the development of a trust mark and trust standards of deliverability. Roper invited the posts to participate in development of standards of deliverability.

Also mentioning the importance of e-commerce to their posts was Michael Chung, the assistant postmaster general of Hong Kong Post. Chung noted that in 2008, outbound parcel traffic from Hong Kong increased 30 per cent. In the period April to August of last year they carried 15 per cent more parcels than they had in same quarter the year before. Some of this was due to their shopping portal ShopthroughPost.com. He looks for a continued expansion of the success of this shopping portal, which is a joint venture with Thailand and China.

There were many other excellent speakers on topics as diverse environmental initiatives and innovative logistics plans. Consider the idea of a ‘smart’ shipping container with solar power and environmental sensors that enable the container to maintain its internal temperature and humidity, and stay in touch! And a continual theme was adapting the posts to the new Internet, which is rapidly evolving, to using social media as an internal collaboration tool at the posts to rethinking the Universal Service Obligation.

Finally, Edouard Dyan, director general of the Universal Postal Union, re-emphasised the common theme of linking the physical and electronic worlds and physical and electronic addresses, a project to be well advanced by the imminent initiation of dot Post top-level domain. Dyan pointed out that e-commerce would not reach its full potential until parcels could be delivered everywhere in the world and he announced that the UPU would soon launch an important campaign, An Address for Everyone, engaging other UN agencies such as the World Bank, UN Habitat and others, in order to provide an address to the two-thirds of the world that do not have one.