UPS New Marketing Strategy

This is more of an observation of a new advertising campaign by UPS -- "We <heart> Logistics" -- a reflection of the firm's move to total supply chain management for the businesses it works with.

This is an interesting move and one that reflects UPS's use of IT to gain success by providing an IT utility to those businesses it services.  In my MIS course, we just read Nicholas Carr's article "IT Doesn't Matter" in which he argues that IT is losing it’s strategic importance.  The reasons he cites for this assertion mostly reflect the rapid growth of IT to the point that IT has become essentially a form of infrastructure.  He likens the growth to the spread of other infrastructural commodities such as electricity and the railroad.  When a technology expands robustly, it becomes better shared than used alone.  For example, companies found that they became more efficient (productive?) if all invested collaboratively in expansion of the railroad industry.  This changed the face of mass production in the mid-1800s.  Likewise, IT has become “ubiquitous” and as Carr points out, “what makes a resource truly strategic…is not ubiquity by scarcity.  You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can’t have or do”  (Carr p.42).  These points are quite interesting and given the rise capital expenditure to nearly 50% related to IT at the time of Carr’s paper (and book), quite important.  


What I took away from the Carr article is that IT does in fact matter, mostly in the way it is managed.  Thus for UPS, their expansion of IT to a utility function is a strategic advantage.  For the companies that utilize this supply chain management service by UPS, this allows them to minimize their IT expense and focus on the core objective of the firm.  


More information on the UPS evolution can be found at thenewlogistics.com -- very interesting!


Source:
Carr, Nicholas.  "IT Doesn't Matter":  Harvard Business Review, 2003.