Seth Godin is a best-selling author and entrepreneur. He has written four books that are popular around the world, including his latest, "Survival Is Not Enough," with a forward, oddly enough, by Charles Darwin. Godin founded interactive direct marketing company Yoyodyne, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998.
Direct: You don’t think direct marketers are very good at using permission marketing, do you?
Godin: I think marketers are particularly good at justifying things to themselves when they know deep down that they are fibbing. Right at the beginning of the Web I said there is a better way to do this. Continually barraging people with endless messages is a dead-end path.
Direct: What’s your definition of the term?
Godin: What permission marketing meant then and what it means now is: anticipated, personal and relevant messages that go to people who want to get them. When a Web site unilaterally changes the way it’s marketing to people, then it’s not permission marketing anymore.
Direct: What fibs do direct marketers tell themselves?
Godin: The biggest fib is that people are interested in them. It’s like that joke: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, Bill Gates has reset the standard to be darkness. Fib No. 2 is, given that what I’m selling is really interesting, I can weasel about what I define permission to be and then feel morally superior that I’m not spamming people.
Direct: Care to give an example?
Godin: The best example is CDnow, which got one-third of all their revenue from recommending a CD to customers by e-mail every other week. Then they went public and sent the e-mail every week and their revenue went up. But what they didn’t measure was what percentage of the customers weren’t coming back. So they increased to every four days and then every two days, and suddenly their revenue was close to zero. They trained people not to open their e-mail. Their biggest mistake is not treating permission as an asset. Every time you cheat to make your quarterly numbers go up, you make your asset worth less.
Direct: Who’s doing it right?
Godin: No one has done it better than Amazon.com in terms of treating it like an asset. Every time you buy from them, they make promises about how they want to communicate with you, and then they keep those promises.
Direct: Amazon is not profitable, though.
Godin: I didn’t say this is the way to become profitable in one day.
Direct: What’s the effect on the customer?
Godin: The cool thing about permission is it’s self-limiting. Once I find a company that gives me proper permission, I shut out everybody else. I haven’t been to another bookstore besides Amazon in years.
Direct: Do you think legislation will dictate permission to direct marketers?
Godin: Marketers deserve legislation because they have not acted in good faith. I hope it will be simple, insisting that marketers tell customers who they are and how they can be reached. And there should be a national opt-out list with severe penalties like jail time for violating. If somebody intentionally goes out of their way to take my time without my permission, they stole from me.
