March - 2004 issue > Cover Story

By Karthik Sundaram

But what about its sixty five other products? Two years ago, when siliconindia interviewed Arun Sinha, who had joined the 84-year-old company as the Chief Marketing Officer, he faced some pretty steep hurdles planted around him. “Pitney Bowes was seen as a postage meter company, our reach was at a very low level within the office, and with over 65-odd products, we were seen as 65 different companies,” Sinha recalls. Not known to many are some startling facts: over 90 percent of the credit card bills in the U.S. are generated and handled by Pitney Bowes. Over $15b worth of financial transactional products are generated, distributed and returned by the company—either by mail, online or voice. The list only grows. After interviewing nearly 2000 customers and a dozen of their biggest clients, Sinha’s first hundred-day (see “Success Secrets”) win was to present the board with a plan to collapse the numerous “companies” into a single identity. “One of our clients helped us in identifying our hidden ingenuity in streamling the communication,” says Sinha.

The rebranded messaging, “Engineering the flow of communication,” helped in quite a few ways. “We were in a $6b market and our share was $4.5b,” the CMO explains, “and with our new business identity, we began expanding into a $250b market. The big fish swam into the big pond now.” In about two years, Pitney Bowes has become “sexy, fun, and full of ideas.”

“When you had such a diverse portfolio products, services and the entailing businesses, the challenge was to bring all of them under the umbrella of Pitney Bowes,” Sinha observes. The CMO began with renaming every product and service within the company by a certain nomenclature. “This reduced the number of products and eased the holding system. Further, we examined what we wanted to keep in the brand and what we should throw out. We didn’t want to ever say we have re-invented the brand.” The heritage was a valuable asset. Trust, reliability and security were three other remarkable assets. “We handle over $15b of business in the mailing process and not a cent has been lost in over 20 years,” says Sinha. “Customers were wont to value this as our biggest asset.” The image of a “boring” company was not one such asset. It went out. And so the process continued for six months and more. Not helping the process was the fact that the company had taken enormous pains to remain out of the press in the past decades. “Our PR was paid to keep us out of any kind of news,” laughs Sinha. “How where we ever going to explain what we can do? The road to the C-suites [C-level executives] was almost closed for us.” Undaunted, the marketing veteran began broad strokes of a marketing campaign to push the brand top-of-mind.

After seventeen years, the first ad campaign was launched. Ogilvy’s quirky creative played on well-known B2C cliches: “Satisfaction guaranteed or your monkey back,” and others. Sinha has spent over $10m on print, direct mail, online and outdoor advertising. Finally, the boardroom was sitting up and looking at the business of its mailroom. And not stopping there. Pitney Bowes was telling the C-level honchos about critical elements in managing the communication flow within their enterprises. Pitney Bowes the mail meter company was aligning with Pitney Bowes, the communication flow engineering company—something it had been all along within the enterprise, without the C-suite’s knowledge! When a revamped PB.com went live, it took 60,000 hits in the first weeks and each customer spent over 2-1/2 minutes on the site, “a phenomenol success rate for a B2B site.” The 250-plus websites were collapsed into a single platform.

The rebranding exercise continued internally also. “When you are moving from a $6b market to a $250b market, your team has to be aligned to the vision,” Sinha says. Over the last year, the CMO and his team of senior executives have met 7,000 of the company staff, in an intensive one-to-one communication program. “I have personally met, face-to-face, with over 2,000 of my company staff. It was a complete 360-degree branding,” Sinha says, quoting the Ogilvy-favorite term. The parallel attacks at all fronts seem to have paid off. In 2003, Pitney Bowes was rated as a top document management company. “Our goal was to change perception by 20 percent,” says Sinha. In a brand-tracking study by New York researcher Penn Shone and Berland, recall had jumped to 35 percent from 16 (a 130 percent increase). The awareness of non-postage capabilities increased by 42 percent, while the media coverage increase by over 30 percent, earning the venerable company the “B2B Company of the Year.”

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