Great to see the Indian govt. waking up to the competition from private courier companies.
The grand old Indian postal department has appointed O&M to devise a new logo and slogan, while McKinsey has been appointed to suggest revamp measures for India Postal dept.
Termed Project Arrow, the initiatives involves turnaround of 500 post offices in two phases [source]
Our main aim will be to enhance on the value additions that are associated with a post office, viz. images, personality traits, impressions, associations and experiences that people working around the ‘functional’ core can relate to, so that they can get a fresh breath of life around them,
If you had to give one feedback to Indian postal department, what would it be?
For me, it’s very simple – I don’t trust them - Build elements that bring out the trust factor, i.e. Walk (or rather Post) the talk!
If you are wondering why this sudden transformation? Well, the government wants to convert footfalls into hard cash, i.e. sell advertising space inside the premise/envelopes, postcards etc and is targeting Rs. 25-30 crore revenue from advertising (by end of 2009).
Not so obvious fact about the Indian postal department is that it’s the world’s largest network of postal department (155,330 offices) and has undertaken a big project to map each and every ctizen’s life – i.e.
The department is in the process of collating the National Address Database as part of the 11th Five Year Plan. Says S Samant, chief general manager for Business Development at the Department of Posts, “In this data we will not only have the person who is living in the house, what is the profession he is following and what is his age group. These are things our postman observes everyday. It’s for our internal purpose and we would also like to have a geo positioning of the data so that it will be an ideal repository for any kind of access”- source
If they execute it well (and do the same exercise for all businesses as well), they can beat the hell out of all local search players (esp. the data players)!
What’s your opinion?
pic credit: Rohit Markande
I think post offices have an awesome presence in the country. They are over a lakh post offices.
They should use this network to sell/paddle all kinds of things – from financial products (they were talking to ADAG), Internet services (think access to places where there is no Internet), information kiosks (for junta in remote places).
More .. ?
Ashish,
YOu make a great point. Just a couple of things. Apologies if I am talking out of the wrong end. What kind of internal politics do you see that may prevent this from happening? Is there (controlled) franchising of post office (branches) in India? Would that add value in that climate?
Cheers
Sri
@Sri the biggest hindrance is the will power or even finding a reason to change! – Govt. offices can keep showing mediocre profits or 100% loss w/o being questioned.
Controlled franchise is obviously one pain, but we also need to understand that courier companies do not cover the whole of India – it’s the postal dept. that knows the true india!!
-Ashish
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