The Post Office in the UK is launching a new marketing campaign created by Publicis;

The Post Office in the UK is launching a new marketing campaign created by Publicis; has a UKPd15 mil marketing budget
From CAMPAIGN, April 20th, 2001

ORIGINAL TITLE: The woman who will Keep the Post Office in use. FULLTEXT: Hall, Emma Deborah Maxwell is aiming to make up for ten years of wasted time. It is ten years since the Post Office advertised on te
levision. And even then,
the commercials were re-runs of two year-old spots. Deborah Maxwell, the company's head of brand marketing, is in a hurry to put
right this decade of neglect. Within a year of joining the company, Maxwell
has secured a 15 million (pounds sterling) marketing budget — a 9 million
(pounds sterling) increase on previous years — and appointed Publicis to
reposition the brand. "Publicis was the one agency that pushed us beyond the comfort zone," she
says. "It didn't just suggest we present a collective happy face. People are
usually afraid of rocking the boat, but Publicis wanted to change things and
it made us look professional." It is not an easy task, as Maxwell, who joined after one year at the Woolwich
and seven years at the AA, is the first to admit. "We are all things to all
men, and different audiences want different things. That makes it difficult." Publicis, Maxwell says, has come up with a catch-all endline that will be
revealed when the new campaign goes on air in the second week of June.
Advertising will be "product-based but brand-led" and will focus on a
"market-grabbing promotion". Internally, the Post Office has come a long way in the past ten years. It
offers travel insurance, currency exchange, cashpoints (in conjunction with
Alliance & Leicester) and online options. Yet, despite the changes, your
average pensioner still feels at home every time they pop along to collect
their benefits. In truth, the advances have been a nod to changes rather than a Post Office
counter revolution. Maxwell's long-term role is to make sure that, once the Government starts
paying benefits directly into recipients' bank accounts in 2003, people still
find a reason to go to the Post Office. Picking up a driving licence application or sending the odd parcel will not be
enough to keep the 18,000 branches in business, and the existing level of 28
million customers a week will be hard to sustain. In fact, unless drastic
action is taken, Maxwell expects the number of customers to drop by 40 per
cent overnight. Universal Bank, a basic banking offering which is being developed with the
Government and banking partners, should help to keep customers coming in. The
final name for the bank is expected to be the Post Office Card Account, which
should also help to raise awareness of the overall brand. "Our problem is that we have never behaved like a brand; we've behaved like a
government institution," Maxwell says. "We've always under-rated ourselves." Her vision for the Post Office is ambitious — she wants to be up there with
Tesco as one of the UK's top ten brands within five years — but with
spontaneous awareness of the Post Office at just 3 per cent, she has a long
way to go. "We are taken for granted," Maxwell adds, "but we are at the heart of the
community and people would be lost without us. I always say that we are like
the pavement — you don't really notice it's there but if it disappeared, it
would be unpleasant. We have to make people remember we are there and make
them think again." The recent rebranding of the Post Office's parent company as Consignia will,
she is convinced, help her goal in the long term. Before the move, there were
two operations using the name Post Office, but now the situation is much
clearer: Consignia is one big corporation with three divisions — Parcelforce,
Royal Mail and Post Office counters. "It's fabulous for us," Maxwell says.
"Now there is only one consumer brand called the Post Office." However, that one brand is still hard to govern when many of your branches are
stuck at the back of convenience stores. Maxwell wants to build on the trust
that consumers have in the Post Office, which handles 140 billion (pounds
sterling) of their cash every year. "Banks and travel agents are closing," she points out, "so people will trust
us to carry on with those services." But Post Offices are also closing — at
what she calls the "normal attrition rate" of 200 branches a year. The
closures are usually due to a postmaster or postmistress retiring and not
being able to find anyone to carry on the business. It is just this sort of sleepy nonimage that the Post Office needs to confront
with its advertising. Even the dynamic Maxwell has to be realistic about the
speed at which she can change things. "This is our warm-up year," she says,
"but new and different things are coming." ISSN 0008-2309; Page 16 Copyright 2001 Haymarket Publishing Ltd. (c) 2001 Resp. DB Svcs. All rts. reserv.
$$CAMPAIGN, 20th April 2001