AUSPOST BOARDS MISSING PRINT MAIL PEOPLE

As mail monopoly Australia Post continues to pivot to parcels, printers and mailing houses are dealing with the reality that neither its board of non-exec directors nor its Stakeholder Council contain anyone with any commercial mail or print background.

Apart from the CEO Paul Graham, the AusPost board is non-exec, and none have any mail or print background. Its chair Lucio Di Bartolomeo comes from the logistics world, as does deputy chair Andrea Staines. The rest of the board are mainly professional non-execs and academics, with some retail and government backgrounds.

The Australia Post Stakeholder Council has one person who runs the small Post shop in Middlemount (population 1800), located in a remote inland area halfway between Mackay and Rockhampton, but apart from her, none of the nine member council has any print or mail experience, and most have no business experience either. There is a representative from the retail world, and one for small business, but most have no tangible connection to mail.

With direct mail, unaddressed mail,and print forming such as major slice of the AusPost letters business, many in  the industry are bewildered why AusPost has no stakeholders from these sectors on its Stakeholder Council. One printer speaking to Print21 said, "You would think at the very least they would have one of the head honchoes from IVE on there." 

While AusPost is clearly focusing on parcels, mail is still a huge business, and direct mail is predicted to undergo a revival as digital marketing fatigue sets in. Marketing gurus such as Print21 columnist Malcom Auld say that DM is the best channel there is, but went out of fashion, however Auld says it is ‘having a renaissance’.  He said, “The response to DM is 1000 times more than online, and online costs are rocketing. You marry a postcard with a QR code and a landing page for instance, and the response rates are tremendous. The postcard creates the alert, the QR code takes you to the landing page, and there is an order form.”

The AusPost Stakeholder Council has five main areas of responsibility:

• improve communication with Australia Post’s external stakeholders
• improve external stakeholder understanding of Australia Post’s business and its portfolio of products and services
• improve Australia Post’s understanding of stakeholder needs and expectations
• enhance Australia Post service and product initiatives through review and feedback
• contribute, review and provide feedback on major Australia Post corporate responsibility initiatives.

Some in the print and mail industries are pointing to the parallels with newspaper publisher Fairfax at the turn of the century, which had no-one with any newspaper or publishing experience on its board, at just the time the internet was beginning to muscle in, particularly into the rivers of gold classifieds. The board at Fairfax, although aware of the rise of the internet, did nothing about it, and consequently lost huge chunks of its revenue to the likes of seek.com, realestate.com, and carsales.com, leading to the contraction and eventual sale of the once mighty Fairfax to Nine Entertainment.