Essential services

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Which is why proposed or actual branch closures are invariably accompanied by an outcry; people feel a strong attachment to the organisation, even if their interactions with – and purchases from – it are infrequent or low-value.

Almost everyone needs Post Office services at some point in their lives, but the in-branch experience is often disheartening and frustrating. So it’s not surprising that this ‘commercial business with a public purpose’ has been through multiple changes in recent years. While its estate has shrunk – often putting more pressure on the remaining sites – it has also been updating its branches and extending its products.

‘Being customer-focused’ is an over-used descriptor, but it’s particularly pertinent for the Post Office – especially for its chief marketing officer (CMO), Pete Markey. He has headed the marketing function for just over a year now andit’s easy to see why the business brought in someone of his experience. During his career, he has worked extensively in utilities, telecoms and financial services, so has covered pretty much all of the Post Office’s core territories or complementary areas.

Markey appears to be revelling in the role. “It’s a really interesting place to work because there’s so much change. It’s a business that knows it needs to change, wants to change and is already on a change journey,” he says. “It’s a great place to be when you can recommend and do things really quickly and see the benefits.”

Markey says the role is more customer-focused than any he has previously held, particularly because of the volumes the Post Office deals with. “We have 17m customers, we’re a highly trusted brand – part of communities – and we are providing vital services. So you feel a huge sense of stewardship and responsibility with this kind of role, because you’re guardian of this amazing asset,” he says.

“We’ve got a really good estate ( 11,500 branches is a great network to have) and 95% of the population come every year – most people are within one to three miles of the nearest one.

“I’ve never worked on a brand for which people feel so much trust and empathy, and have such a strong opinion towards. You’re always building on strong foundations, but it needs to become more relevant, and to be seen as a lot more progressive than it is today,” he explains.

The focus for Markey has been on improving the experience that the Post Office delivers for its customers. However, as the business model has changed over the past 10 years, this has raised its own challenges. The Post Office owns about 300 of its outlets and the rest are run as franchises – either stand-alone, or as facilities within other people’s outlets.

“So how you influence is really important: influencing your own people is one thing, but [we also have to influence] other people’s employees, who either work full-time or part of the time on your brand,” says Markey.

One way the marketing team has got closer to the business’s customer base is through its Voice of the Customer programme. Initially piloted in 150 branches, the scheme is now in about 4,000 of them. Feedback is gained by using pre- printed till receipts, cards and a quick response code to invite customers to take part in an online survey, and this feedback is then used to improve its service.

However, one of the most prominent changes at the Post Office in recent years has been its Post Office Money marketing work, which has raised the profile of this crucial side of its services. The business is number one for foreign-currency travel money, and its savings accounts are long-established, so an aim with the campaign was to build awareness of its bigger-ticket financial services products.

“Post Office Money is saying ‘we’re more than just the core business you know we do’. We have three million financial services customers, so we’re a growing, challenger, financial services brand,” says Markey.

“We’ve seen big growth, particularly in mortgages, savings and credit cards – we just need more people to know we do it. Right now, if someone is either a first-time buyer or remortgaging, the Post Office wouldn’t be in the front of their mind, so we need to get to a point where it is,” explains Markey.

The decision to brand its financial services products as Post Office Money was much deliberated internally, but Markey says the use of this umbrella branding is unlikely to be repeated: “You won’t see us doing a lot more of that. We’ve got mobile launching, but that won’t be Post Office Mobile. I don’t want to have a whole lot of these coming out, because I don’t want to overly fragment the master brand.”

However, he says, in the case of Money it worked. “There is a specific set of opportunities and challenges with it – you need to increase awareness and boost credibility, but from a strong base; we needed to ring-fence it and say this is the Post Office you know, but one that offers more than you know it does.”

The company carried out research – with existing and potential customers – looking at a whole range of different brand names, from ‘Bank’ to ‘Money’ to ‘Financial Services’, and tested these. While research suggests the closer a brand gets to the word ‘bank’ the more authority it has, there are regulatory issues around whether using that would be possible.

“Post Office Money was seen as being far enough along the spectrum that you could succeed,” says Markey. “Internally, there were noises around Post Office Financial Services, which sounds clunky, but you get where that was going – a bit more of a functional name could work. But you put that in front of customers and you watch the lights go out in their eyes. So [research] challenged some of our internal thinking and gave us confidence that we had a really good foundation to build from.

“Our research showed you needed an umbrella to say to people we’re credible and serious about this thing. It was a really thorough process before we’d even got to the [advertising] campaign brief.”

Post Office Money launched at the start of the year, with an ad campaign created by FCB Inferno and starring comedy actor Robert Webb, who’d featured in its Christmas campaign.

A big believer in market research within the marketing role, Markey works closely with the Post Office’s main agency, Quadrangle, which was involved with both the branding and the pre-campaign research.

“We did a lot of work around what launch propositions to go with, what messages would resonate with consumers and, obviously, the research of the creative itself,” explains Markey.

As well as using more traditional research methods, he also drew on neuroscience in some areas. “For example, I’ve talked about calling the Post Offices ‘branches’; well that means a lot to us internally, but not a lot to people externally. So we changed the launch campaign script; when Robert Webb was in a branch, he talked about what ‘we do in here’.

“It’s a subtle change. People would broadly get the language we were using internally, but – when you use neuroscience – you see it was a bit confusing to customers. So those deeper insights are really powerful to know when business language doesn’t work for customers.”

Getting the right celebrity to head a campaign can be a complicated process for businesses. As well as making sure that they appeal to the target audience, there’s the issue of ensuring – as far as humanly possible – that they won’t embarrass the brand, either with something they have previously said or done, or that they go on to say or do.

The main research for Webb was done ahead of the Christmas campaign in which he first appeared, and the Post Office did additional research around the social media response to him and the other celebrities it was considering at the time.

“That was really useful, and we’ll do it again for future campaigns,” says Markey. “While you may think you know an individual, if you look at the body of commentary on them and find they’re universally hated – or ‘Marmite’ for certain audiences – that’s really useful to know. That was the other important thing with the research – understanding the demographics.”

The company has opted for a new leading face for its advertising to coincide with its summer travel service, in the form of The Inbetweeners’ star Simon Bird. This is also the first creative work from its new ad agency, DLKW Lowe.

What’s interesting about the timing of Post Office Money was that it came in the wake of the financial crisis, when trust in banks – and, potentially, all financial services – was particularly low. So did that help or hinder the Post Office?

“We’re almost the banks in reverse. No-one would doubt the banks’ credibility to offer financial services, but they don’t trust them. We’re the flip side of that; we’re hugely trusted, but people don’t know we do financial services and we need to build credibility – so it’s the problem in reverse,” says Markey.

“It definitely helps if people are looking outside the core high street and widening who they want to talk to, and we do feature well in that set of companies.”

So one of the key elements of marketing for Money was around disruption. “The danger for the Post Office, with any campaign, is it could be like a comfy pair of slippers – giving you a warm hug – but we need to do more than that,” says Markey.

“What became clear when we analysed our target market is that they’re really time-poor, and finances aren’t top of their list; they’d rather not have to think about it. So the media approach for Post Office Money launch went very much for people’s downtime.

“We did a lot of digital out-of-home, particularly in the mornings and evenings, when people were travelling – we sponsored wi-fi at stations.”

The target audience for Money is middle- England families. “They are the heartland for the Post Office currently and for growth, but we are seeing a polarisation in some products. For instance, motor insurance is definitely a slightly older audience, as is savings, while mortgages are younger.

“There are about three primary segments we want to go after and two secondary. With the secondary ones, you want to influence positively, but they are not as important as the primary. We’ve had to focus on it because, otherwise, you become all things to all people – your money gets diluted – so having those three primary segments helps.”

One area the Post Office is looking to improve is its use of data analytics. To this end, it hired James de Souza, from Dunnhumby, at the end of last year, to be its head of customer analytics.

Markey says: “My intention is that we link data together far more, to build a richer picture and help us target more.

“We’ve got a whole lot of transactional data; like all these things, we could be better, which is why we have brought in new talent. We are working hard on the mechanics of getting closer to customers, whether it’s through data capture or analytics, and then using that to be better.”

However, Markey admits that – while the opportunity is there for data to be a “leading force” in the business – more work needs to be done on linking it with the Post Office’s research data.

“We talk more about big insights than big data because it’s all about what you find in that data and what you do with it – it’s about focus, because the danger is you collapse under this pile of stuff,” he says. “We need to be ruthless at what we decide to look at and what we don’t.”

Going forward, market research – be it data analytics, neuroscience or more traditional tracking – will become more important at the Post Office. Markey cites Mothercare as a business that has gained much richer insights through data capture from digital receipts.

“I’d like to get to know the 17m people who come through our doors every week – there’ll be a lot of focus on that this year,” he says.

“My questions are who are they? What brings them into branch; how do we get them to come back; what do they think about the brand; and what more could we do to get closer to that audience?”

This article originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Impact