My Rating: 8 /10
Title: Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends (Amazon Link)
Author: Seth Godin
Written just prior to Yahoo! acquiring Seth Godin’s company Yoyodyne, Permission Marketing will open your eyes to just how pervasive marketing is around you and provide insights into how money flows across the web.
Say no to “interruption marketing” and find out why permission is required for effective marketing in the 21st Century.
“Mass media is dead. Long live niche media!”
The primary method of marketing in the 20th Century worked like this:
- Find somewhere that potential consumers congregate (TV, sports games, newspapers, urinals, etc.).
- Place an ad is such a way that it interrupts the consumer and temporarily redirects their attention.
- Repeat the process over time to change consumer behaviour.
Something unwanted happens when taking this approach. It doesn’t happen immediately, but only once other people see the success of the trailblazers. Those who cleared the path before them.
Imagine you are walking down the street when someone stops you to try and sell you something. Depending upon the product and how persuasive they are you may agree to purchase it.
The next week you walk down the same street. Instead of just one person, there are now three people at 20 meter intervals all trying to sell you something. Odds are you will be slightly less engaging with them, but you notice they can now stop more people at one time.
A month later you once again walk down this same street. There are now 30 salesman all trying to stop you as you walk. Suddenly you zone out and take no notice of them. Barely registering a reply when they approach you. Everyone else walking down the street is doing the same.
Profitable large-scale interruption marketing is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
“The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend.”
Mass marketing is caught in a dangerous catch-22:
- People have a finite amount of attention.
- People have a finite amount of money.
- The more products offered, the less money there is to go around.
- In order to capture more attention and more money, interruption marketers must increase spending.
- But this increase in marketing exposure costs big money.
- Spending more and more money in order to get bigger returns leads to ever more clutter, more demands on peoples attention, and over time a numbed audience.
- The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend.
As mass marketing is pulled under by it’s own death roll, it is doing four things to try and keep alive:
- Spending more in odd places. Campbell’s Soup even bought ads on parking meters!
- Making ads more controversial and entertaining.
- Changing ad campaigns more often to keep them “interesting and fresh” (this is despite high quality TV ads costing more, per minute, than a hollywood movie).
- Abandoning advertising and replacing it with direct mail and promotions. Junk in your mail (physical, not electronic) is one of the most profitable forms of interruption marketing.
These measures can only go so far. So for both the sanity of marketers and consumers alike, things need, and have already begun, to change.
“Every marketing campaign gets better when an element of permission is added.”
The scarcest resource is time. You can make more money, rebuild a lost fortune, but the one thing you can never get back is your time. Time is precious. And people are willing to pay to protect it.
Interruption marketing costs time. Not only you and me as individuals, but society as a whole. Every second of time that someone wastes taking in unwanted advertisements is a second that could have gone into making improving the quality of their life, or that of those around them.
This is where “permission marketing” comes in. Permission marketing is anticipated (you look forward to it), personal (you relate to it) and relevant (you are interested in what it has to offer). To put it simply, it saves you time because you no longer need to sort through the clutter to find the products and services that will benefit your life.
My main new year’s resolution for 2015 is to put what I read into action
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Here’s a rough guide to permission marketing:
- Offer an initial incentive to engage the prospect (information, entertainment). This must be overt, obvious and clearly delivered. Interruption marketers spend all their time interrupting strangers. Permission marketers work on turning strangers into friends, so that they don’t have to talk to strangers.
- The marketer offers a curriculum of information through time. Gradually teaching the consumer about the product or service he has to offer.
- Reinforce the incentive to maintain permission by providing additional, engaging or useful content.
- Open a two-way dialogue so that messages can be fine-tuned and enable marketing to become more personalised through time.
- Leverage the permission gained to change consumer behaviour towards profits.
Granting permission to be marketed to is a selfish act
People hook themselves up to the intravenous drip of permission marketing for very selfish reasons. There are several reasons someone might grant permission for marketing to flow straight to them:
- To save time searching for the right product or service.
- To save money by eliminating the costs associated with traditional marketing.
- To avoid stock outs. Think the milkman who provides fresh milk everyday. A more modern example would be printers that automatically order ink refills when they are getting low.
Permission marketing is all about providing more value to the customer than the marketer receives. Otherwise the permission will be taken away. Say no to interruption marketing.
– Stephen
Click here to find more details and reviews of Permission Marketing at Amazon.com.
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Related Resources
Seth Godin’s Blog – Seth has posted something every day for at least the last 6 or 7 years. Quite a feat.
Some interesting newsletters that I have provided permission to market to me. They do this by having good content that I enjoy reading:
reneweconomy.com.au – Newsletter provides daily news and updates on renewable energy, climate change, government policy and business activities.
changethis.com – Monthly newsletter provides summaries of new business and personal development books.
brainpickings.org – A weekly newsletter of eclectic articles exploring literary concepts both new and old.
