BrownCafe
Brand perception is a great and unwieldy thing. It can propel a corporation to market dominance or send it into a tailspin that can be hard — even impossible — to recover from.
With that in mind, tools like surveys can be an important part of determining how customers experience a company’s culture or how they perceive their interactions with it.
Morning Consult recently polled more than 300,000 Americans about the brands they feel have the most positive influence on the people they serve. Asked whether a company or brand makes a positive or negative impact on their community, those surveyed ranked United Parcel Service, Inc highest, with the U.S. Postal Service an extremely close second.
Retailers are contending with a new challenge as this year’s holiday shopping season heats up: extra shipping fees during the busiest weeks.
United Parcel Service for the first time is tacking on a surcharge on packages shipped to homes around Black Friday and the week before Christmas, hoping to convince companies to send their orders outside those peak periods — or to make more money from ones that must be delivered then.
The surcharge has prompted e-commerce retailers large and small to consider other delivery options, such as FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service, passing the additional costs to their customers, or delaying shipments to cheaper times.
United Parcel Service (UPS) acquired a pharmacy license in Georgia in a move that could broaden its business into not only shipping but relabeling drugs, CNBC reported.
UPS confirmed the move, saying the license is tied to “new and potential business engagements” handled out of its Duluth, Ga., facility.
It’s not clear how strategically significant the move might be for UPS at a time when the company faces uncertainty as Amazon.com (AMZN), a major customer, tests its own final-mile delivery service, which could be a negative both for shipping rates and volume.