Correspondence: Alex Batchelor, Royal Mail Centre First Floor 35–50 Rathbone Place London W1T 1HQ, UK. Tel:+44 020 7441 4783; E-mail: anna.gray@royalmail.co.uk

¹joined Royal Mail as Marketing Director in June 2005, after almost four years at Orange. He is responsible for £7bn of mail-related revenues and delivering three key strands of Royal Mail's strategic programme: revitalising the product portfolio; rebalancing prices; and making the Royal Mail 'easy to do business with'. While at Orange, he was VP, Worldwide Brand, and was responsible for managing and developing the Orange brand on an international basis. He joined Orange from brand consultancy, Interbrand, where he spent five years, latterly as joint Managing Director. Before that Alex was Board Strategic Planner at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, working on accounts including Toyota, Hilton and Carlsberg Tetley.

Received 12 November 2007; Revised 12 November 2007.

Abstract

The transformation of the media and communications landscape following the emergence of digital in the mid-1990s is being given new impetus with Web 2.0. In that context, this paper considers the changing social and commercial role for consumer mail. The first half begins by looking briefly at the evolution of mail and its changing uses. It then looks at mail's dominance as a communications channel, 'junk' mail and mail's 'user-value'. The second half focuses on the impact of digital on mail. It shows that, far from sounding the death knell for mail as predicted, digital and mail are enormously complementary. The paper concludes that digital, in combination with the trend towards customer-centricity, is actually serving to re-invigorate and re-invent mail around its three unique strengths.