Permission Marketing

Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

Seth Godin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781471105777
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favourite programme or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family meal, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snaring 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 voluntarily accept advertising. Now the Internet pioneer who has dramatically improved marketing effectiveness in media introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out to only those individuals who have expressed 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.

This book is dedicated to Jerry Shereshewsky, visionary, apostle to the uninformed, brave marketer. Yoyodyne wouldn’t have developed without him, and this book wouldn’t have been written without his insights and agita.This book is dedicated to Jerry Shereshewsky, visionary, apostle to the uninformed, brave marketer. Yoyodyne wouldnt have developed without him, and this book wouldn’t have been written without his insights and agita.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Don Peppers

Introduction

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 Facilitates 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 FAQ

Acknowledgments

Index

Foreword

by Don Peppers
coauthor, The One to One Future
founder, marketing 1:1, inc.

I predict that businesses all over the world will soon be familiar with most of the concepts outlined in this book. Sales and marketing people everywhere will soon be talking about the very commonsense principles of “Permission Marketing” and how best to put these principles to work for their own businesses.

To prove the accuracy of my prediction, I’ll ask you to consider your own hectic life. The truth is, your whole problem comes down to a question of time and energy, doesn’t it? Technically, life is easier for you than it was for your parents, because so much of the drudge work is now done by machines. But for some reason you’re busier than ever, isn’t that right? And doesn’t it seem as though every day you get still busier?

How can this be? Simple. Because there are so many more claims on your attention, that’s why. You’re already overloaded with an embarrassment of opportunities to absorb your time and expend your funds doing things, watching things, using things. But every day even more opportunities are presented to you. So now when you decide to spend an hour surfing the Web, the first thing researchers want to know is: Hey, where did that extra hour come from, anyway?

It came out of your life, that’s where. You made a tough choice. Decided to use an irreplaceable hour of your life cruising the Net rather than watching one of the 115 channels on the tube, or answering one of the 25 e-mail messages stacked in your queue, or driving out for a snack at one of the 30 fast-food restaurants located within a few miles of your home, or sunning at the pool, or playing Scrabble with your teenage daughter.

Face it: Your attention—the time you have available to “pay attention”—is an increasingly scarce resource. And, in any free economy, when resources become scarcer they command higher prices.

Now, to some of us this might appear to be a simple statement of economic principle. To Seth Godin, it’s also a business opportunity.

The basic idea of “Permission Marketing” is very simple: Each of us is born with only a certain amount of time on this earth, and figuring out how to use it wisely is one of life’s primary activities. “Paying attention” to something—anything—is, in fact, a conscious act, requiring conscious effort. So one way to sell a consumer something in the future is simply to get his or her permission in advance. You’ll do this by engaging the consumer in a dialogue—an interactive relationship, with both you and the customer participating. Rather than simply interrupting a television show with a commercial or barging into the consumer’s life with an unannounced phone call or letter, tomorrow’s marketer will first try to gain the consumer’s consent to participate in the selling process. Perhaps the consumer will give his permission because he is volunteering to learn more about a particular product or class of products. Or perhaps you’ll actually offer some type of payment or benefit in return for the consumer’s permission.

In a noninteractive world this would be the kind of crazy, totally impractical idea that you might be tempted to chalk up to the idle musings of an overimaginative marketing geek. But the age of interactivity has actually arrived. It came suddenly, while no one was looking, and interactivity changed the rules.

The technology of interactivity has two quite different implications for businesses. On the one hand, because consumers can gain access to information faster and more simply than ever before, many marketers are finding their products “commoditized” and their margins squeezed. You can use the Web to buy a new General Motors car for as little as $50 over dealer invoice. Or you can buy a thousand shares of General Motors stock for a total commission of as little as $7.95. While this sounds like great news for consumers, clearly one of interactivity’s immediate implications for business is that margins are going to get hammered and customer loyalty will be harder to come by.

But interactivity can also empower a business to engage its consumer customers in individual dialogues, developing relationships with each of them that grow stronger with time. Not only can this strategy shield a business from being commoditized, it can also provide a valuable service to consumers—a service, moreover, that might easily be worth more than access to the latest, most accurate price comparisons on a commodity product.

Engaging a consumer in a dialogue is something that business owners used to do in the old days—before assembly-line production, mass distribution, and mass media advertising. In the old days selling was a kinder, gentler process, and it was based on the willing participation of the consumer. It was only the arrival of the mass production economy that changed all this. The modern economy was defined in terms of assembly-line production of standardized products, mass distribution of these products to consumers in a wide geographic area, and mass media vehicles to carry standardized advertising messages. Under these conditions it became irresistibly cost-efficient to broadcast the same message to every consumer, rather than bearing the cost of engaging any single consumer in a separate, individual dialogue.

Today, however, because of interactive technology, it has become cost-efficient once again to conduct individual dialogues, even with millions of consumers—one customer at a time.

Interactive technology means that marketers can inexpensively engage consumers in one-to-one relationships fueled by two-way “conversations”—conversations played out with mouse clicks on a computer, or touch-tone buttons pushed to signal an interactive voice response unit, or surveys completed at a kiosk. The point is that consumers can, once again, be involved in the marketing process. Marketing in an interactive world is a collaborative activity—with the marketer helping the consumer to buy and the consumer helping the marketer to sell.

As a business, if you do it right, the dialogue and involvement of a customer will lead to customer loyalty, for that customer. The more the customer is engaged—the more he or she has collaborated with you to fashion the service you are rendering or the product you are selling—the more likely the customer will be to remain loyal to you, rather than going to the trouble of switching this collaborative activity to one of your competitors.

For the business, this might seem like a lot of effort just to sell another quarter’s worth of goods. It is. But there is no viable alternative, because the mass production economy has basically been tapped out. You already know this, if you just think about what your own life is like as a consumer within that economy.

As a consumer, you now inhabit an endlessly expanding universe of new offers, urgent solicitations, price-off promotions, and money-back guarantees. This is the mass production economic system carried to its logical extreme—businesses all trying to find more customers for an ever-widening array of more specialized and innovative products and services. In order to sell this vast arsenal of products, marketers all over the world soak up every square inch of space, every extra second of time, and they paste their sales messages into those nooks and crannies, hoping you’ll encounter them. So, as a consumer your life is now filled to overflowing with this previously unimaginable variety of opportunities, choices, and assorted messages—all calling for decisions on your part, even if the only “action” you take is to pay attention for an instant. And make no mistake about it, your constant attention is demanded. Every idle moment you possess is seen by some business somewhere as an opportunity to interrupt you and demand more of your attention.

Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is—do you really want more marketing messages?

Interactivity allows a business to break this vicious cycle. With cost-efficient interactive technologies now available, businesses can actually take a step back and secure their customers’ permission to sell them things—to get them to pay attention to their selling messages. A business can now ask a consumer directly if he’d like more information and then deliver it. A business can now reward a consumer for receiving and acknowledging its message, ensuring that the consumer’s own interest is served by learning about a new product or service.

There are lots and lots of ways to do this. Offer a coupon or a cash incentive. Play a game. Accumulate points. Sponsor a contest or a drawing. But whatever you do, however you do it, if you get your prospect’s permission to sell to him, you have won a valuable asset, an asset no competitor can take from you. You have won the prospect’s cooperation and participation. He and you are now collaborating.

So yes, my prediction is that companies all over the globe will be embracing Permission Marketing. They will embrace it both as an offensive marketing weapon, to steal customers from their competitors, and as a defensive measure, to avoid the kind of commoditization represented by e-commerce.

For any reader who wants to know how to compete in an interactive universe of World Wide Web sites, call centers, and sales force automation tools, stay tuned. If you want to avoid the e-commerce trap of commoditization and margin pressure, then this book’s for you. If you want just to understand better the kinds of marketing relationships that are most likely to develop in the age of interactivity, then read on.

Anyone else, read a different book. You’ve got lots of other things you need to do anyway, right?

Introduction

I wasted a lot of Harvard University’s endowment. More than $6 million, to be specific. And everyone around me applauded.

In 1983 Spinnaker Software emerged as the best-funded software start-up in history. With more than $17 million in venture money (including about $6 million from the sages at Harvard), Spinnaker set out to invent an entire genre—educational computer games for kids.

As one of a handful of brand managers at Spinnaker, my job (at the tender age of twenty-three) was to spend millions of dollars advertising our new products. Amazingly enough, this little start-up ranked among the two hundred largest advertisers in the country in 1984.

Armed with millions of dollars of ad money, I ran ads in People and dozens of other magazines. We had constant discussions about how to make the move to television and, of course, found ourselves invited to attend the U.S. Open and other great advertising shmoozefests.

The good news was that the advertising bought us distribution. We were picked up by Radio Shack, Lechmere, Target, and Kmart. Within a year we were the leader in a zero-billion-dollar market.

The bad news was that we had no evidence at all that our advertising was actually working. No proof that the millions of dollars we were spending were doing anything more than buying fancy cars for the commissioned salespeople and generating fear among our competitors.

It was a great gig, but after sixty products and some great experiences, I decided to go into the book business. There, once again, I got a firsthand ringside seat at a waste jamboree, a huge bonfire of money spent with no return on traditional advertising.

Giant companies were spending millions of dollars to advertise a product on the network television coverage of the Olympics. Publishers with established brand-name authors had no idea which individuals were buying their books and had to start their marketing and promotions from scratch every time a new book was launched. Huge conglomerates were publishing hundreds of books a year but weren’t cultivating a loyal audience, a brand name, or a scalable way of introducing new products.

What I had suspected at Spinnaker was proven true. Advertising wasn’t working very well. It wasn’t easily measured or tested. It wasn’t predictable. And it was expensive.

For the last six years I’ve been a student of how companies deal with advertising and a practitioner of how they might do it with more success. I’ve watched with amusement as Excite ran million-dollar campaigns on Seinfeld—overpromoting a product before its time—and I’ve watched with despair as truly great products have disappeared because of a complete lack of promotion.

In 1990 the folks at Prodigy (a company that will be remembered as being years ahead of its time) hired my colleagues and me to build a promotion for t...