Download Bright Lights Project - USPS
The United States Postal Service is hurting, and will more than likely stop Saturday deliveries, close a few thousand branches, disemploy 120,000 people and, sometime sooner than anyone would like, raise the price of stamps again.
The standard marketer retort to these woes is full of blather about the USPS failing to delight customers and innovate, especially when compared to the ways FedEx and UPS have eaten its lunch. Of course, this is nonsense, but it makes for the self-congratulatory reading that marketers like to share with one another (like this piece at Forbes).
The problem is bigger than that, sadly, and can be summed up in one word: Email. The USPS was created to transmit messages across distances both near and vast, just as postal carriers had done for centuries prior pretty much everywhere else in the world. This business purpose, or strategy, got confused with the tools, or tactics, of message delivery; namely letters and packages. The USPS committed to a medium, and not to the messages that were its true calling.
Sure, it should have figured out that overnight delivery could be a moneymaker (it already had the infrastructure to do it, after all), or come up with better pricing strategies. But it was never in the package business, per se, nor in the speed racket. Postal service was (and is) about regular, reliable transmittal of messages. So faxing, and then Email, would still have emerged as the biggest threats to its business.
But this isn't a story about broken or inefficient government. USPS was expert at doing what it believed it was supposed to do. Therefore, what will save it will require a redefinition of that purpose, and I think all it requires is a reaffirmation of the importance of message over medium, as this blogger suggested.
Here are three thought-starter ideas for what I think the USPS needs to do, or at least consider:
- Own secure, reliable electronic transmittal -- Whether exploited by hosts or hackers, email is at once a miracle of simplicity and a kludgey tool. Why couldn't the USPS provide the most secure and reliable email service in the Known Universe (think "registered Email")? It should know lots about the qualities of effective messaging that high-tech competitors either don't know, or don't care to know. Ditto for texting; couldn't the USPS be an app that provides better SMS, instead of letting mobile providers take the interface for granted?
- Provide authoritative online IDs -- The future of the Internet isn'’t anonymous, yet there's still no good, single way for companies and/or individuals to credibly identify themselves. So, just like you couldn't get snail mail unless you had a valid address, why couldn't the USPS provide the same affirmation for virtual locations? It could help individuals control their online presence (i.e. if it wasn't your official USPS designation, it wouldn’t be legit), and do the same for corporations. They're the government, after all.
- Manage message networks for businesses -- Again, why wouldn't the people who've been delivering messages for the last few hundred years know more about how to structure those activities than some hoity-toity consulting firm? Why not create the processes and then sell the services for better message distribution (aren't those endless "cc" emails the same thing as junk mail?), not to mention facilitating workplace collaboration on those messages?
OK, I just read my list. It's a long shot, to say the least. But I still think I'm right on the the USPS being in the message business, and not in the business of the media of their delivery, per se. If my ideas won't work, what will?
(Image credit: Neither rain, nor snow, nor poor WiFi reception...)
