I’ve been following the We [Heart] Logistics campaign for UPS since it launched last month.
On the face of it, the tagline seemed a bit too mushy for my liking, considering that logistics in its true sense is a lot more than getting a shipment from point A to point B. (Granted that’s perhaps the brief, to soften the mathematical features of it all!).
Not many people knew that logistics has been the heart of what UPS had been doing for years. There’s a sizable part of a chapter on this in The World Is Flat, where Tom Friedman talks of ‘insourcing’ –how UPS manages hubs for companies such as Toshiba. Computer service hubs, mind you, not shipment distribution hubs. All this is tied to sophisticated logistical feats of its supply chain –that most of us see as just trucks.
So as I began monitoring the news of the interception of package bombs from Yemen on an UPS plane, I realized that UPS is missing a huge opportunity here. Very little related to its ‘logistics’ shows up in the feeds on social media. or Google, Yahoo and Bing which are nourished by social channels.
I wondered what’s taking Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide so long to update the campaign to tell us, for instance how UPS intercepts bad shipments, how the technology and human intelligence works in synchrony. Enough of people dancing in the streets with heart-shaped icons. Tell me UPS, why logistics is more than bar codes, and why our shipments will be safe. Why business is better off because of your vast network of 96,000 vehicles, 268 planes and bicycles.
Hoipolloireport 