Ten years ago this month, Seth Godin published what many marketers at the time considered to be one of the most cockamamie books they had ever read.
The book was “Permission Marketing.”
In 1999, Godin argued that in a world of increasingly fragmented media with thousands of brands pushing thousands of marketing messages, one crucial resource to advertisers was becoming critically tight: consumers’ time and attention.
“As the marketplace for advertising gets more and more cluttered, it becomes increasingly difficult to interrupt the consumer,” Godin wrote.
As a result, he argued, marketing based on interrupting as many prospects as possible was bound for failure.
“Interruption Marketing is the enemy of anyone trying to save time,” he wrote. “By constantly interrupting what we are doing at any given moment, the marketer who interrupts us not only tends to fail at selling his product, but wastes our most coveted commodity, time. In the long run, therefore, Interruption Marketing is doomed as a mass marketing tool. The cost to the consumer is just too high.”
The answer, according to Godin: Get prospects’ permission to communicate with them.
“By only talking to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message’” he wrote. “It allows marketers to calmly and succinctly tell their story, without fear of being interrupted by competitors or Interruption Marketers. It serves both consumers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange.”
While permission marketing doesn’t seem like a revolutionary concept now, 10 years ago it was unheard of.
For example, in 1999 Rosalind Resnick, co-founder of e-mail marketing list firm NetCreations, was the sole vocal proponent of opt-in based e-mail advertising in traditional marketing circles. Her unyielding stance on the issue annoyed a lot of people.
At the same time, then president of the Direct Marketing Association, Bob Wientzen, spoke for many traditional marketers by arguing in support of unsolicited commercial e-mail. He claimed marketers should be able to have “one bite of the apple.”
The economics of e-mail would ultimately discredit Wientzen’s argument and put Godin’s seemingly crazy permission concept on the map.
Today, permission-based commercial e-mail marketing—or ethical e-mail marketing, as Godin calls it—is a billion-dollar industry.
Arguably, if it weren’t for commercial e-mail and its economic quirks, Godin’s permission-marketing philosophy wouldn’t be nearly as well known or embraced among marketers as it has become.
“E-mail definitely put a fine point on the concept,” Godin said in a recent interview with Magilla Marketing.
He added he’s gratified at the progress the industry has made.
“Businesses built around e-mail are far more sophisticated than I thought they’d be,” he said.
However, Godin said he is discouraged by the lack of intellectual curiosity displayed by most marketers overall.
“If you’ve got a marketing budget of $500,000 or more, you should be reading five marketing books a year,” he said. “I am astounded when I walk into a room full of marketers, ask who has read The Long Tail and no hands go up.”
He also said he is astounded by the things they do in the name of marketing they’d never to anywhere else.
“They have the cloak of a logo and a brand and they think they have anonymity,” he said.
Too many marketers think what they’re pitching is so important that their marketing messages aren’t spam whether they’re permission based or not.
The trick, he said, is to build a brand people would miss if it were to disappear.
“If Harley Davidson disappeared tomorrow, it would be missed by a lot of people,” he said. “If the local carpet-cleaning guy or even Dell disappeared tomorrow, I doubt people would miss them. They’d just go elsewhere for the same cheap service.”
When asked what he’d change about “Permission Marketing” if he were to write it today, he said there would be less focus on online games and prizes.
When asked how many copies Permission Marketing has sold, Godin responded: “Two bazillion, or perhaps three, I’m honestly not sure.”
A free download of the first four chapters of Permission Marketing is available here.
