Comment Central

david rolfe

Get out your violins: I’m about to complain about the trials of being a direct marketer. Boo hoo. The postal strike is making our jobs difficult. Pass the tissues – I know you feel my pain.

But the truth is that the strikes are causing problems – for clients, for agencies, and for the postal service itself. Because despite all the special vitriol postmen reserve for the so called ‘junk mail’ that makes their bags so heavy, clients sending marketing letters with Royal Mail is what makes the business run.

We’ve all heard Royal Mail’s long-standing gripe that “Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit”. Yes, other providers take profitable downstream access work while the Queen’s posties still deliver the final mile. It must be hard to see that happening, but it’s a fact of deregulation and it is not going to go away. Striking, however, is building up a raft of problems for the future.

Not all business users have switched to other providers. Some like the quality assurance of having a Royal Mail postmark – it shows a company is supportive of the service and that it wants to align itself with the well-loved Royal Mail brand.

Or, I should say, the ‘once well-loved Royal Mail brand’. The sad fact is that more big spenders are considering leaving every day the strikes go on.

The industrial action is giving businesses an excuse to swap providers, even though, in the event of a strike, the mail taken out of the system downstream generally ends up in the same sorting office while posties warm their hands on a brazier outside.  

It’s not news to say that the strikes are damaging the Royal Mail brand. But it is perhaps pertinent to put a real value on it in this way.

The longer the strikes go on, the less Royal Mail will be viewed as an old, friendly and dependable brand – and the more lucrative contracts will switch elsewhere. This will leave  postmen with even more to carry on that last mile, and even less sympathy from the bosses as their diminished pot of funds shrinks even further.

No client wants to have to make these decisions. But many feel – rightly or wrongly – that they have no option in dissociating themselves as far as possible from a brand they can no longer rely on.

 David Rolfe is client services director at customer management agency Snowball