Mail meets a very basic need: the need to communicate with, and send things to remote others.Īs we have seen, however, for an extraordinarily long time - about 150 years - mail did not really have any serious competitors, in terms of alternative communication channels.Īlmost instantly, digital was viewed as a step-change improvement on what existed previously and this fuelled its rapid, mass uptake.
Rather, the development of Mail 2.0 is bringing mail's distinct characteristics and unique strengths sharply back into focus, while revealing its inherent complementarity with a digital world. The important point, though, is that it is the uses of mail that are changing, not mail itself. Both separately and together, these factors are bringing about a long-term change in the way social, transactional and direct mail are thought about and used - in themselves and alongside digital.ĭigital is creating ‘new’ uses of mail and, along with the growing focus on customer-centricity, driving the development of Mail 2.0. Since then, the established uses of mail have been impacted by three distinct, although inter-linked factors: the rapid emergence and widespread uptake of digital the growth in consumer concerns around ‘junk’ mail and the accelerating trend towards customer-centricity. Not only were mail's uses as a ‘mass’ communication channel universally understood, but Mail 1.0 was unquestioningly used (more accurately perhaps, taken for granted) as the predominant channel for (i) non-real-time social communications and (ii) commercial communications - on a one-to-one or ‘mass’ basis - with named individuals and companies, that is, B2C and B2B. In retrospect, the mid-1990s can be seen as the high-water mark for what we might call ‘Mail 1.0’.
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