Marketing Sustainably: What's Going on Beyond and Beneath the Green? A blog posting questions, opportunities, concerns and observations on sustainability in marketing.
Chet Dalzell has 25 years of public relations management and expertise in service to leading brands in consumer, donor, patient and business-to-business markets, and in the field of direct marketing. He serves on the Direct Marketing Association Committee on the Environment and Social Responsibility, where he is currently chairman of the Committee's Marketing & Communications Public Outreach Strategy Working Group (2005-present).
Chet co-developed the first professional certificate program in environmentally responsible marketing within the United States. He also served on the United States Postal Service Greening the Mail Task Force (2007-2010), and led its Life Cycle of Mail Subcommittee.
Email Chet below, or reach him at Twitter or LinkedIn.
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As a citizen and a close follower of postal goings on, I realize the United States Postal Service and Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe ultimately are not to blame for the five-day delivery announcement which transpired on February 6. Postal customers, labor unions, direct marketers and Americans in general have reasons to be angry—or at least very concerned—as to what is really going on here.
We all know that it is Congress and the White House—as a whole, not any lawmaker in particular—that largely caused the Postal Service's recent default and current fiscal mess. Their inability or unwillingness to stop the mandating of 75-year pre-funding of USPS retiree benefits, and the subsequent raiding of those funds for the federal government's own spending sprees elsewhere, deserves much of the blame.
Cost-cutting and diminishing services to U.S. citizens have been forced on the Postal Service, because a "fiscal cliff" already has arrived at L'Enfant Plaza.
Yes, there are other macroeconomic issues in play at the Postal Service—the digital migration of First-Class Mail, electronic payments and the Great Recession's most recent effects and after-effects, for example. All the same, forcing such draconian budget mandates on the Postal Service is a serious miscalculation that was (unfortunately) included in the 2006 postal reform law. No other federal agency is held to the same pre-funding benchmark, and even fewer responsibly financed and accountable private pension schemes (there are still a few around) ever look to seven decades to the future.
This needed fixing five years ago, when the economy started to teeter and such rosy views of postal finances quickly began to sour. Here we are in 2013, and we're still waiting for Congress to act.
The White House hasn't been helpful either.
Now we're faced with five-day delivery come August—and we're left wondering if it can be stopped, reversed, prevented or mitigated, even if Congress and the White House were able and wished to intervene.
Will the reported $2 billion in said-savings really transpire—and make a difference? Has anyone considered the economic trade-offs? We all know many weekend advertisers that relish a spot in the mailbox on Saturdays—and this generates a lot of commerce. Can it all be simply pushed to a Friday?
The reality is that the Postal Service, as much as it seeks to manage itself as a business, remains a quasi-public institution, a part of our Constitution, and subject to both cycles of Congressional meddling and Congressional relief, the latter now being in short supply.
It's quite amazing that the Postal Service is as efficient and as affordable as any postal service in the world, public or private—delivering communications to our homes six days a week. Still, it must deal with political representation that well may be intended, but which only seems to punt from crisis to crisis—or worse, after each crisis has rendered its most devastating effects.
Here we are in a downward cycle ... again. This time our daily mail—and direct mail advertising along with it—is being expedited, by Congress, to the dilemma faced by dying daily newspapers in stagnant metropolitan markets—going, going, gone, at least on Saturdays.
Except this is our Postal Service, belonging to the citizens of the United States on paper. Is this squeeze on hardcopy communication inevitable—and our only choice? Or will some in Congress and the Obama Administration wake up to the fact that the Postal Service is a secret weapon for many brands (and political candidates), as well as a service to its citizens, and, therefore, do all their Constitutional best to ensure a viable future here?
By the way, I LOVE this recent piece in Esquire—required reading for our lawmakers: http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-trouble-0213?page=all. |
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