Compass Points Reviews Permission Marketing

CSSP reviews

Permission Marketing
Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers

By Seth Godin and Don Peppers
Simon & Schuster, 1999 - 255 pages $24.00

If you or your marketing staff is frustrated by the apparent ineffectiveness of your latest adventures in advertising, it may be because traditional marketing no longer works. In today’s media-saturated society, advertising clutter renders use-less the conventional effort to grab your prospect’s attention long enough to deliver a simple product message - an approach called “Interruption Marketing”. In his book, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin describes how one can induce a prospect to give you permission to deliver your message and, subsequently, develop a lasting and profitable customer relationship. The goal is to design such a marketing program to earn the most precious thing a customer can offer - their attention.

The “Permission Marketing” approach is much more focused and productive than the shotgun techniques of most mass media promotions. The goal of a successful permission marketing program is to accomplish the following three keys:

your message is anticipated (people look forward to hearing from you)
personal (the messages are directly related to the individual)
relevant (the marketing is about something the prospect is interested in).

Godin does an excellent job of not only communicating the concept of permission marketing, but backing up his claims through familiar examples of success and failure in the history of advertising.

The real punch in this book, however, is delivered by the author’s expertise in transferring the permission marketing concept to everyone’s favorite new promotional tool, the Internet. As vice president of direct marketing for Yahoo!, Godin thoroughly understands how to properly leverage the marketing potential of the Internet. One section entitled “The Most Popular Myths About Marketing on the Web” comprises an essential primer for any traditional marketing professional attempting to use the Internet. The discussion of the 12 myths explains why treating the Web like traditional broadcast media is a huge mistake - a mistake made by many companies who are, as a result, wasting billions on ineffective on-line advertising.

After exposing these misperceptions about successful on-line promotion, Godin methodically lists the biggest benefits the Internet offers and then launches into the five simple steps to successful permission marketing on the Net. Valuable discussions like these make the book an entertaining and insightful package that details the process of “turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers”.

For more information or to order your copy of Permission Marketing from Amazon.com, click on the title.

For more, click here for a free subscription to Course and Direction.