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MAIL MOMENTS

By Terry Gray

The United States Postal Service recently conducted a survey to determine and establish the importance of the mail.  They sent surveys to 2,606 respondents.  Two questions I would consider asking the designers of this survey.

1)    Why not 2,605 respondents?

2)    If respondents don’t respond, are they still respondents?

Some of the objectives of this study were to:

1)    Understand consumer mail behavior in the home by key applications.

2)    Understand consumer needs to enhance the value of the Mail Moment.

The U.S.P.S. targeted respondents who, among other things, knew when to bring the mail in, how to sort it, what to throw away, and what to do with it in general.  I have yet to understand what this next paragraph means, do you?  It has something to do with whom they interviewed.

“The outgo sample (N=4,200) was balanced to match exactly the percentage distribution of the 62 PRIZM clusters (defined at the block group level) and, subsequently, the 14 U.S. Postal Service household segments in the U.S. household population.”  WHAT!

The U.S.P.S. found out that Mail Moments are personal and private affairs.  “Ninety-three percent of Mail Moments feature a lone consumer spending time with a mailpiece.  Even when the consumer is in a room with others, she is typically split off from the group and giving her time to the mail.  The mail can be a way to carve out personal space.”  This is a person that I would not want to deprive of her mail!  (Did anyone notice the gender bias here?  It seems as if only housewives and secretaries deal with the mail).

Now, some attitudes about mail were compared between homes with Internet and without Internet.  Here are just a couple.

1)    I worry a lot about the security of financial transactions conducted over the Internet.  Seventy-one percent of those without the Internet worried about it.  Why?  Why worry about dying in a car if you never get in a car?  Only sixty-nine percent of Internet users worried about it.

2)    The Internet is an ideal way to get information about products and services.  Thirty-five percent of those without the Internet thought so.  Sixty-four percent with the Internet thought so.  Is anyone surprised?

Three conclusions that were reached could have been reached by sitting down and thinking for a moment.  These conclusions were:

1)    Mail is not going away because it helps consumers thrive.  The value of mail is rooted in the consumer’s need to shop.

2)    The consumer-pull for mail is at risk because “junk mail” ruins it for everybody.

3)    Mail that has real Job-Value makes Mail Moments more enriching and increases the consumer-pull for mail.

So, in my own psychotic summary, I live to shop.  Junk mail gives me the tools that I need to shop.  Junk mail ruins it for everyone.  I am included in everyone therefore the tool that I need, junk mail ruins it for me.  Since my Mail Moment is ruined by junk mail my life is ruined since I live to shop.  I must die now.

I’d say that this expensive survey project was conceptionalized by some upper level postal employee with political aspirations and backed by a federal political pal. He probably watches “Yes Dear” and sympathizes with the wimp husband.  What a fine example of government waste, from my perspective anyway.

Terry Gray

Normal Guy

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