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Understanding the Principles of Permission Marketing |
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 In my entry into the world of Internet Marketing, one of the books that had a great influence on me and which largely shaped the techniques that I have subsequently developed is the book by Seth Godin, “Permission Marketing.” At the time of its writing, Mr. Godin was the Vice-President for Direct Marketing of Yahoo, then the undisputed giant in the World Wide Web. Aptly subtitled “Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers,” the title alone fully encapsulates the overall guiding paradigm of the permission marketing principle.
For a long time before the World Wide Web came into the
picture, marketers were engaged in an ever-spiraling advertising
approach which Godin calls “interruption marketing.” The main goal of
this type of marketing approach is to grab a potential customer’s
attention from whatever he is doing and keep that attention long enough
for the advertiser to make his pitch. It could be in the form of a TV
commercial which interrupts our favorite program, or a telemarketer
which intrudes into a quiet time being enjoyed. Godin claims that
interruption marketing has lost its potency and in fact, has become an
increasing source of annoyance for most of its targeted public.
Advertising on billboards has moved to moving boards on buses and
taxis. Posters that previously were placed sparsely in key locations in
a supermarket have been transferred to the floor in the hope of
catching buyers’ eyesight as they traverse the grocery floor while
pushing their shopping carts. As consumers responded by deliberately
shutting off these forms of advertisements from their consciousness as
much as they can, advertisers have erroneously responded with more
vigorous interruption. Instead of slowing down on their annoying
tactic, advertisers have escalated the level of interruption in the
false appreciation that this was the answer. Unfortunately, as more and
more statistics and studies have pointed out, it is not.
Godin proposes a shift in thinking and appreciation of the way
companies look at their customers by advising them to increase their
profits by selling more things to fewer customers. An idea that was
originally popularized by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their book
“The One to One Future,” Godin recommends the general idea of focusing
on customer share instead of market share. Permission Marketing shares
the general thinking behind what Peppers and Rogers expounded in their
book: “Getting a new customer is expensive.” The focus then of a
company should be on identifying their more profitable customers,
keeping them longer, and getting far more money from them over time.
But customers are not acquired overnight. As Seth Godin clearly
illustrates in his book, the key then to a profitable long-term
business is to grow your customer base by turning ordinary strangers
into friends, and then eventually turning these friends into customers.
The underlying principle in the whole chain of increasing levels of
relationships is a corresponding increasing level of permission. As
your business gains more and more trust from your interactions with
potential clients, you also acquire increasing permission from them to
educate them about your company and your products.
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