Blast from the past: Permission Marketing
I decided to time travel for my book review and read Permission Marketing by Seth Godin which was written in 1999. I thought it would be interesting to look at the world from the perspective of someone who was immersed in online marketing at a time when I personally did not have an email address (or maybe I did but I certainly didn’t use it).
Permission Marketing centres around direct marketing and the interaction that takes place online between marketers and consumers. It analyzes how the internet has been used (and abused) by marketers. The idea behind Permission Marketing is straightforward: paying attention to something is a conscious act that requires a conscious effort. Therefore if a marketer can get a consumer’s “permission” to engage in the selling process, the consumer has already made a conscious choice to participate.
Godin juxtaposes Permission Marketing and Interruption Marketing as polar opposites. He calls interruption marketing everything from TV and radio ads to email blasts and banner ads on websites. The bottom line is that they are one-way communicators and that they don’t get consumers to pay real attention to the company/product.
By the tone of the book, and just from general knowledge, it is clear that when this book was written many companies considered email blasts the wave of the future; the new lower cost direct mail campaign! Godin presents some pretty incredible statistics around what these campaigns actually did cost marketers and the figures are in the hundreds of millions.
An interesting point made by Godin is that marketers should focus on their share of the customer, not necessarily market share. This is an interesting concept and something that I had never heard before. It seems to borrow from a well known truth that it is easier to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Godin refers to this share-of-customer as building a ‘Permission Asset’ which is critical to building a relationship with customers. Godin even remarks that businesses should expect to reward their customers for their attention, even if a sale is not made. This is an interesting concept as it does not sound like an initiative that would generate positive returns in the traditional sense. I have tried thinking of examples where this strategy has been employed and the only thing that crosses my mind are those pop-up customer satisfaction surveys that promise some kind of incentive for completing a 5 minute (it always takes 15) minute survey.
One of the sections discusses how marketers often attribute business or campaign success with website traffic and hits. Without ever having been directly involved with tracking online traffic for a particular website or campaign, my sense is that many businesses continue to use this metric as a gauge of success. It was one of the few areas of the book that I felt was still the same today as it appears to have been 12 years ago. Intuitively, there is still value in traffic and hits and I imagine that this will always be the case. The difference between the ‘99 marketer and today’s marketer is likely that the ‘99 marketer may have simply been happy (and received a bonus) based solely on increased traffic whereas today’s marketer would be more concerned with a conversion rate of those visitors. If this is true, then Godin’s claim that “every commercial website … should be 100 percent focused on signing up strangers to give you permission to market to them.” (p.160) would have come true.
I found myself saying “of course that’s that way it should be done!” a number of times while reading Permission Marketing. Strategies such as educating consumers about your product/service, making communication personal and relevant and creating a dialogue seem painfully obvious in developing online marketing campaigns. The fact that these, and other, tactics appear (at least to me) as being cutting edge at the time was surprising to me.
I wonder what Permission Marketing 2.0 would look like? User generated content seems to be the natural extension of engaging consumers in a conscious, two-way dialogue. How long (or is it already happening?) will it be before marketers turn to their users to come up with their next campaign?