David Shinnebarger of the U.S. Postal Service was honored last month as the "1998 Communicator of the Year" by the Business Marketing Association's New York Chapter. Shinnebarger is the manager, marketing, for expedited and package services. His postal career began in 1983 when he joined the organization as a letter carrier in Orlando, Fla.
PR NEWS recently caught up with Shinnebarger to chat about why he was chosen for the award, which singled out his efforts in creating U.S.P.S.'s "Priority Mail" campaign.
The promotion helped position the organization as a global business competitor. Last year, U.S.P.S. closed its books with a 16.1 percent increase in priority mail revenue with about $3.9 billion in gross sales - $535 million above what it earned in 1996.
In this exclusive interview, Shinnebarger discusses the high-profile push for priority mail, a two- to three-day, low-cost service. It included an extensive advertising campaign and integrated PR and marketing efforts.
PRN: Can you share some highlights and strategies of the Priority Mail campaign?
Shinnebarger: In October of 1995, I got assigned to the U.S.P.S.'s portfolio of package delivery services [includes priority, parcel post and express mail], which was a unique assignment since these operations were being put under one manager. We used to have separate managers, but what U.S.P.S. found was that they were competing with one another, instead of the competition. The new assignment meant I had a bigger business to manage, but a smaller staff.
There were several reasons for focusing on priority mail - including the legal constraints of not being able to aggressively sell express mail at a discount - that also precluded us from pushing parcel post. But I knew we could build a program around priority mail to grow revenue for the package businesses.
PRN: Had those divisions failed to make money?
Shinnebarger: No, they were making money, but we were losing market share to FedEx and UPS. I believed we could focus on priority mail since that was our biggest revenue generator and we had more of a competitive edge there.
PRN: How challenging was it to convince those in upper management that U.S.P.S. should go claim a core of the market?
Shinnebarger: It was ungodly. If I had to do it over again, I'm not sure I would. I was a young manager and I was dealing with a senior management team that was fairly parochial. They had to cut through the clutter of deciding whether we just wanted to be a government agency or whether we wanted to thrive as a competitive enterprise.
For instance: Did we want to be competitive and risk raising commercialization and privatization issues on Capitol Hill?
We had to deal with such issues as comparative advertising, which was our first hurdle. And second, we knew that once we positioned ourselves as a competitive enterprise, we might push some legislation faster than we wanted to and influence our competitors to lobby against us. And the third issue was the amount of money: We started with a $26 million budget, but we wanted a total of $56 million.
Shinnebarger's Resume
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PRN: So how did you manage those?
Shinnebarger: To mitigate those obstacles, we showed the campaign to Capitol Hill staffers we thought were important [those on the postal service sub-committee] and we prepared for the lobbying assault. We pre-greased the skids with legislators and their aides so that when the letters started flying, they were prepared.
PRN: But what about the funding and the buy-in from others who would need to support it?
Shinnebarger: We took the budget through the finance process by showing postal service financial executives what the competitors were spending. And we took the plan to our chief marketing officer to secure funds for a promotion.
On the advertising side, we showed a group of VPs in the company that the only way to grow revenue for our business was to position us in the customers' eyes - [since] among our customer base, there was fuzziness about when and how to use the product.
We realized that to build awareness quickly, we had to compare our service directly with our competitors' services by telling the truth. That called for conveying that this is a two- to three-day product - it's not overnight - and positioning it in the right category.
And when it came to the advertising, we determined that we weren't going to do it the way Visa [4824Z] and American Express [AXP] had been doing.
Our approach was to give them the facts with a smile so that we weren't slamming our competition - just merely introducing information into the marketplace. And the advantage was that we were neutralizing what the marketplace perceived as our competitors' advantages.
PRN: What role did PR play?
Shinnebarger: I briefed Larry Speakes, our senior VP of corporate relations, and talked to him and his entire team [about 15 professionals]. We took them through the Priority Mail program and told them what needed was an internal program to tell employees what their roles were in supporting this. And we told them what we needed on the press end - publicity in trades like AdAge.
PRN: How crucial do you think the PR was?
Shinnebarger: It was critical. When you have 800,000 employees at all different levels, you have to rally support. They rose to the occasion and did quite a bit internally to make this viable.
I'd say, initially, it was less successful with the external press because we weren't giving them that much new news. But that has changed.
PRN: How does U.S.P.S. plan to stay competitive in this era of electronic media, specifically the push toward online banking and the increasing use of e-mail versus general mail?
Shinnebarger: We're going to focus on our core businesses - advertising mail; packages; correspondence transactions, i.e., letters; and publications, that's the book business, with a fifth focus - bringing up new businesses and launching new enterprises (they are still being fleshed out). We're finding a way to play a role on the Internet and exploring, and moving toward, more of an electronic commerce role.
David Shinnebarger can be reached at 202/268-3052. The U.S.P.S. Web site is http://www.usps.com.