There’s Always Something Special about Stamps
Following on from all the excitement that this year’s Olympics brought, I’ve been thinking about stamps and how they inform or remind us about significant events, famous people, our cultural heritage and what’s currently happening around the world. It made me realise how, through their stamp programmes, Posts continue to provide a significant role in helping us connect, support and celebrate. We have not, as yet, seen a move away from stamps. They remain an important part of the product portfolio for Posts, as a method to enable communication, a source of information and provide a value more than purely financial. The primary purpose of a stamp is described by many users of postage as being purely functional, i.e. it provides a label to confirm that carriage has been paid. Yet, even in the current world of high tech innovation, although there are now many alternatives to the stamp, they continue to exist, be developed and to provide a good return on investment.
Stamps continue to benefit from advances in technology to improve their quality and timeliness to market and costs of production. New features for security or to aid processing can be embedded as well as their being able to reflect latest techniques in art and design. They have been made easier to use (e.g. Self-adhesive), whilst retaining features known to be of continuing value to customers.
For most Posts their annual philatelic and collectable programmes are important, not just for income generation (this can be a significant contributor to the bottom line), but also as a way to reach out to customers and give something back to society. I wanted, in looking at the breadth and range on offer, to establish how issues of special commemorative stamps can support the Posts’ corporate social responsibility programmes.
In effect, special commemorative stamps, when issued and sold at face value, are affordable, accessible to all and creative depictions of topics. They can be, and often are, created for events or causes which are acknowledged to be significant, thereby generating interest and promoting purchase by people who are not necessarily traditional or regular users of postal services.
By partnering or supporting other national or international events in a co-ordinated programme of activity, stamps can play a significant part in increasing awareness. For example, in 2012 the Diamond Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth was commemorated by stamp issues appearing in many Commonwealth countries around the world such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ascension Island and the Bahamas.
In its simplest form, when used on mail circulating nationally or around the world, the colourful designs are remembered, often collected and welcomed by recipients of mail, thus contributing to the overall feel good factor and promotion of postal services. Most front line sales staff in post offices will speak of how customers often request “special stamps” when sending presents or cards. Look at how most Posts produce a Christmas range each year.
Throughout the year we find Posts using stamp issues to help support fund raising, health improvement and charitable causes. For example, since 1998, USPS has been supporting Breast Cancer Research. As of September 2012, their special stamp had raised over $75.8 million for medical research. This year, New Zealand Post and An Post have issued stamps to support children’s health and wellbeing. Post NL has just issued a “pop up “book of postage stamps to mark children’s book week and support literacy.
For those interested in art, literature, music, science and nature there are numerous examples to commemorate people and events, often of international significance or celebrating partnerships between countries. Royal Mail has issued a set of stamps to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens; An Post has commemorated the centenary of the death of Bram Stoker (Irish novelist famous for his Dracula novel) by a special set of stamps.
USPS is celebrating nature through a set of stamps meant especially for “nature lovers” and South Africa Post has paid tribute to its national heritage by issuing a set of stamps depicting national flora and fauna. The Postal Corporation of Kenya issued three new stamps to mark the 40th anniversary of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), thereby raising awareness of endangered species, the Montreal Protocol and green issues.
Public service (fire and rescue, emergency services and the armed forces) are regularly found recognised within stamp programmes, as is bravery and matters of national importance linked to constitution. This year, CTT in Portugal, has been celebrating 175 years of the national army school.
Reflecting back on history and commemoration of events this year, we were reminded of the international significance of the sinking of the Titanic with the anniversary illustrated on stamps from USPS, Canada Post, Magyar Posta, An Post, Bulgaria Post, bpost and many others. The Polish Post issued a stamp to commemorate Piotr Skarga (author of The Lives of Saints), after the Polish Parliament nominated 2012 as the Year of Father Piotr Skarga, wishing to highlight the important role that Skarga had in Polish history. Ascension Island Post issued a series of stamps celebrating the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition (1921-22), which was the last to be led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Austrian Post commemorated the 150th Birthday of Johann Puch, who founded the Austrian bicycle industry.
National or international sporting events and success feature regularly in stamps and this year’s Olympics were a good case in point. The Olympics have traditionally featured in the stamps of host nations, as well as of those countries celebrating the contribution of their own athletes. Thus, we saw Royal Mail building on the experiences of those who preceded them. One Royal Mail director provided the following interesting quote: “After the Sydney games in 2000, Australia Post was voted 4th most popular sponsor of the games, when in fact it hadn’t been a sponsor! “
So assuming that this provided some competitive motivation, let’s look at what Royal Mail achieved as a result of the London Olympics 2012. In the UK it has been said that the Royal Mail London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Gold Medal Winner Stamps programme generated 20% more sales than they had predicted. Royal Mail has reported that the key to the success was in fundamentally changing its whole process, for design, print and production, reducing what is a normal 24 month schedule down to 24 hours.
Stamps were issued and released to recognise each of the 63 individual gold medal winners on an on-going and responsive basis throughout the period of the games, and in this way, becoming an integral and highly anticipated or expected part of the Olympic experience. This recognition of individual and team success within a stamp affirmed their place in the nation’s history and enabled everyone to access and support a once in a lifetime event via stamps.
With “Memories of London 2012” released on 27th September a final set of stamps was issued to mark the iconic moments. Royal Mail provided specific recognition to the 70,000 volunteer games makers who contributed to making the events a success. Royal Mail believes that the Team GB gold medal winner stamps that, in effect, personalised the athletes’ success (24 hours after the winning a gold medal) together with the painting of gold post-boxes in the champions’ home towns have helped them achieve more positive local and national media coverage than all the official sponsors combined.
The sales results achieved show how stamps and the Post can create a tangible and emotional positive impact and perception. It will be interesting to see whether, as a consequence of the Olympic champions stamps in the UK, there is an uptake in ‘Smilers’ stamps and similar personalised stamp products.
When we carried out our research on stamps we found many media articles about the longer term attractiveness of stamps as a potential investment opportunity, given volatility in the world economic marketplace. Clearly this doesn’t apply to all stamps, since, in the main, these are high volume products with a defined face value, which may be of interest, but not necessarily of collectable or specialist interest.
Nevertheless this drove me to bring down my old stamp album from the loft where I found much to remind me of past global events and special interests, but unfortunately I found no hidden rare stamps in my personal collection, no pot of gold. Having said that, there is an innate empathy and warmth, which occurs when one looks at the stamp programmes, past, present and future around the world, so it seems clear to me, at least, that there remains something special about stamps.
Many of you will be experts and this is a topic on which there are likely to be different perspectives. Do get in touch with us to share your views, thoughts and, indeed, knowledge.
