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Personalised Stamps
Postal services around the globe are continuing to look at new and innovative ways to add value to personal correspondence and encourage the use of mail in preference to emails and ecards. Personalised stamps have proved to be a novel, but popular addition for making your mail piece more individual and personal. Originally unveiled by Australia Post as a world first in 1999, personalised stamps have proved enormously popular in Australia during the past nine years, as well as in China, Indonesia, Great Britain, South Africa and Papua New Guinea.
During the 2000 Olympic Games, Australia Post partnered with Fuji Xerox to issue stamps honouring all Australian gold-medal winners. The stamps were produced overnight on a Xerox DocuColor 2060 and issued by noon the day after the athlete or team won gold. The commemorative stamps proved to be extremely popular.
The personalised stamp service offered today by Australia Post differ from those of the Olympics; they don't feature a personalised photo on the main stamp, as stamps are regarded as legal tender. Instead, they are attached as a separate perforated stamp to the actual stamp. On a side note, Australia Post ran a very effective bus shelter campaign a few years ago promoting their personalised stamps.
The USPS trialed personalised stamps in August 2004, but the service was dropped just seven weeks later, after the service ran into trouble when pranksters got a little inventive with the program, printing up stamps with pictures of people including Slobodan Milosevic, Linda Tripp and Ted Kaczynski. Some people have a odd sense of humour—a little to odd for the USPS.
It's a shame that the USPS personalised stamps service didn't get off the ground, particularly as they made a significant investment in the service and ran a very effective outdoor advertising campaign. Maybe they'll pick it up again in the future. In the meantime, you can still produce personalised US stamps through stamps.com, but this service requires you to print stamps on your own printer rather than ordering them.
Australia Post has demonstrated that personalised stamps are far more than just a novelty item and nine years on the service continues to go from strength-to-strength. They've proven to be a great value-add to the humble snail mail!
Posted on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 at 5:38 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/116
Comments
Milosevic, Tripp, Kaczynski? I could certainly think of some worse things to go on some letters... So, would custom stamps offset the built-up disdain that the average consumer has towards the postal service?
Increases in postage combined with the decrease in efficiency may need more than value-added stamps.
Posted by lukeMV on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 at 7:16 AM