Permission Marketing

Book Review

Permission Marketing

Rodney Olden, Jr.

MBA 761

August 3, 2000

Godin presents Permission Marketing as a solution to what he terms the “Attention Crisis” marketing professionals face today. Although technology has created many new mediums that can be utilized to market products, it has also immensely increased the number of outlets vying for our attention. Compared to years ago when there were only a handful of networks and a small number of newspapers and periodicals, today we can select from 282 channels and more. The large number of choices imposed on a finite quantity of time means that consumers are willing to spend less and less time paying attention to marketing.

Technology has also allowed customers to steadily increased their standards to expect the highest quality product no matter what they purchase. This means that consumers no longer have to invest nearly as much time investigating what products will meet their needs because all are expected to.

Current methods of marketing, Godin shows, involve breaking through the clutter to try and gain the customer’s attention for a short period of time. “Interruption Marketing” breaks into your dinner in the form of a cold call or occupies the space right after a TV writer cleverly markets his own show and entices you to continue watching it with a cliffhanger. Commercials become ever more glamorous and expensive to produce because there are so many different products, solutions to problems, competing for the finite resource of time. The only problem is that the more consumers are marketed to, the less they pay attention to it on the whole.

Permission marketing takes into account the value that consumers place on their time in concentrating on reaching the customer with a message that is anticipated, personal, and relevant. Anticipated, because the customer has “volunteered” to be marketed to and looks forward to your contact. The message should be personal, catering to the individual. In order not to waste the consumer’s time it should be something they are interested in.

Once you have gained their permission, it is important to continue to cultivate that permission and relationship. As the customer grants you more information, it should be used to develop a message that is even more personal and relevant to their needs. This, in a sense, binds the customer to you because you are meeting their needs and presenting yourself as a path of least resistance towards fulfillment of their needs. The end goal, of course, being to turn these consumers in to long-term profitable customers.

In order to implement Permission Marketing, you must first interrupt the customer and convince him to volunteer to be marketed to. This is done with an incentive. The incentive can take many forms, but it must be obvious and clearly delivered. Once the consumer volunteers, you offer them a curriculum of value and information over time. During the process, the incentive must be reinforced to ensure that the consumer’s attention is maintained. Throughout the process, the goal is to increase the level of permission and to leverage that into a valuable relationship for both parties.

Again, technology plays a part in that it has allowed Permission Marketing to be cost effective. Because we can now cheaply, efficiently, and effectively gather and sort information about consumers, we can craft a message that is more personalized and perceived as a greater value because it is relevant to the problems they are trying to solve.

In addition, because the World Wine Web presents a medium upon which the delivery of these messages is free, we can present these messages to consumers with increased frequency. This increases the success rate once again because we have used the permission that was granted to us to advance the level of information and value add we present to the customer.

In reading this book, it didn’t speak to me on the level of the text of Levitt. It almost seems as what is being presented is a workaround for the attention crisis. Permission Marketing does effectively utilize technology to present a relevant and personal message, but in order to get to that point you must first interrupt the customer and get them to pay attention.

I did appreciate Godin’s recognition of the value people place on their time. I use myself as an example in that every day I go trough life expecting that new products and