Stamp of Disapproval




Royal Mail announces 30% price increase

So DHL and the like charge about £2.50 to deliver an envelope Next Day to the other side of the country.

Imagine if a salesperson made the following pitch… ‘To get a letter next day to the other side of the country just drop it in one of our conveniently located drop boxes and a member of our trained team will deliver it by hand the next day to anywhere in the country’. How much? “60p a letter – regardless of whether it’s next door, the next town or 500 miles away.”

If this offer was from a new carrier I reckon you’d be mightily impressed – and probably wondering how they can do it for so little?

If the provider was the Royal Mail and the price of the service represents a 30% increase on what you are paying today, how do you feel?

In a Daily Telegraph poll yesterday 50% of respondents didn’t think the Royal Mail should be able to set their own prices due to their universal service obligation. In fact the overall mood was somewhere between outrage and an inevitable sense of betrayal.

So what could the Royal Mail do to stop the outrage of the British public?

It seems to us that the company has failed to successfully communicate what the Royal Mail brand is all about. Always resisting pouring the ‘gin’ of a private company into the ‘mother’s milk’ of the old state run institution that we all grew up with.

But branding, if it’s about nothing else, is about clarity.

This is who we are. This is what we do. This is why we do it. These are the values that make us different. Judge us – our products, services and pricing against these.