Having jacked up postage prices and entered direct marketing digital printing itself by installing a couple of high speed printers last year, Australia Post appears to be spruiking a ‘Complete Print + Deliver’ service by tempting businesses with PO boxes, like mine.
Your Promotional Material By Australia Post – from as little as…wait for it, 15cents per item! Your promotional material will reach more customers with us. Followed by Why Australia Post? and a bar graph which claims ‘latest research’ shows promotional material sent by Australia Post is read by 70% of recipients versus only 22% for Junk Mail.
The email domain is @austpostdirect. Australia Post’s logo and corporate red is all over the DL flyer there is even a pic of a smiling AP postie, but there’s a catch. Like every other recipient of this flyer, I thought it was Australia Post offering print+delivery services for incredibly low prices, to the disadvantage of its own DM clients.
It took an eagle-eyed sleuthing Print21 reader ‘Banksy’ to dig deeper and find that the domain name is not connected to Australia Post. It appears to be a separate company using Australia Post’s livery, image and logo. A Trojan DM horse in thousands of PO boxes.
When a stamp costs 70 cents how can this organisation print AND deliver envelopes for 15 cents?
Australia Post’s own website offers as its lowest rate for unaddressed mail, small, no more than 50g; a rate of 16.8 cents – and that is intra-state only. Go inter-state and it jumps to a minimum of 19.7 cents. Remember that’s delivery only. Anything weighing over 50g and the price rockets.
What is astonishing is that Australia Post has allowed this deception to be distributed via its own PO Box network. Deception is a strong word but look at the scans of this flyer and tell me if any reasonable person would not assume that it is an offer by Australia Post? Even the email address is configured to lead to the belief it is officially an Australia Post site.
It begs the question if this is not a salvo aimed at Salmat and PMP with their street-walking delivery squads cutting Australia Post out of mailbox deliveries. The reference to Junk Mail only being read by 22% of people versus 70% by Australia Post is a telling device.
All large organizations I know of jealously guard their corporate image, use of logos and ‘passing-off’ attempts. They give corporate style guide manuals to their resellers and get shirty if not enough white space is around the logo for example. And yet, with this offer that appeared yesterday it seems that a third party has usurped AP’s entire corporate look and image for the purpose of making people think it is a genuine Australia Post offer.
Did Australia Post know about this before it put these flyers into its own PO Boxes?
If the offer is genuine – and it includes all printing, freight, Australia Post lodging and letter box delivery to your nominated suburbs/postcodes – it is one heck of a deal, but can other printers get access to the delivery rate of well below 15 cents?
Your feedback is valued and: thanks again to Banksy.