Permission Marketing

The man Business Week calls "the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age" explains "Permission Marketing" — the groundbreaking concept that enables marketers to shape their message so that consumers will willingly accept it.

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity — time — Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness — and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.

In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of Permission Marketing:

1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating?
2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?
3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?
4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?

And in numerous informative case studies, including American Airlines' frequent-flier program, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!, Godin demonstrates how marketers are already profiting from this key new approach in all forms of media.

• One: The Marketing Crisis That Money Won't Solve
• Two: Permission Marketing - The Way to Make Advertising Work Again
• Three: The Evolution of Mass Advertising
• Four: Getting Started - Focus on Share of Customer, Not Market Share
• Five: How Frequency Builds Trust and Permission Facilities Frequency
• Six: The Five Levels of Permission
• Seven: Working with Permission as a Commodity
• Eight: Everything You Know About Marketing on the Web Is Wrong!
• Nine: Permission Marketing in the Context of the Web
• Ten: Case Studies
• Eleven: How to Evaluate a Permission Marketing Program
• Twelve: The Permission

To be true, I was a bit sceptical when I started reading this book. The author didn't help when he started with examples based on "dating" and its rules, a concept that is extremelly alien to Europeans. He continued with some blatant factual errors, but the more you read, you began to understand that he wasn't totally wrong. In the end, I was a reluctant convert, even if I believe that he treated a number of subjects a bit shallower than was necessary.

All in all, a recommended reading.