Quit interrupting. Ask permission.

---

Product Description

The man Business Week calls "the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age" explains "Permission Marketing" -- the groundbreaking concept that enables marketers to shape their message so that consumers will willingly accept it.

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity -- time -- Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.

In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of Permission Marketing:

1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating?

2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?

3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?

4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?

And in numerous informative case studies, including American Airlines' frequent-flier program, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!, Godin demonstrates how marketers are already profiting from this key new approach in all forms of media.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17870 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
Seth Godin, one of the world's foremost online promoters, offers his best advice for advertising in Permission Marketing. Godin argues that businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional forms of "interruption advertising" in magazines, mailings, or radio and television commercials. He writes that today consumers are bombarded by marketing messages almost everywhere they go. If you want to grab someone's attention, you first need to get his or her permission with some kind of bait--a free sample, a big discount, a contest, an 800 number, or even just an opinion survey. Once a customer volunteers his or her time, you're on your way to establishing a long-term relationship and making a sale. "By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message," he writes. "It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange."

Godin knows his stuff. He created Internet marketer Yoyodyne and sold it in 1998 to Yahoo!, where he is a vice president. Godin delves into the strategies of several companies that successfully practice permission marketing, including Amazon.com, American Airlines, Bell Atlantic, and American Express. Permission marketing works best on the Internet, he writes, because the medium eliminates costs such as envelopes, printing, and stamps. Instead of advertising with a plain banner ad on the Internet, you should focus on discovering the customer's problem and getting permission to follow up with e-mail, he writes. Permission Marketing is an important and valuable book for businesses seeking better results from their advertising. --Dan Ring

From Publishers Weekly
Godin, a business whiz kid who does direct marketing for Yahoo!, asks a provocative question: Does advertising work? He cites example after example of recent misguided campaigns, a "waste jamboree" of traditional ads aimed at consumers who no longer care. There's an "infoglut" out there, he says, of ads in myriad media whose only power is to "interrupt" people's lives. Godin's professional journey to his current status as a guru of online promotion began with his work for such industry bigs as Prodigy and AOL. Now, he specializes in direct-mail campaigns online, where he takes advantage of the interactive nature of the technology. Using traditional terms such as reach and frequency to define his efforts, he moves further, into the touchy-feely area of "permission marketing," his term for developing a personal relationship with consumers, where they actually enjoy receiving correspondence. On tape, Godin's message is winning because of his youthful attitude: self-assured, at times cocky, but always sensible. Based on the 1999 Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Industry Standard
If you've ever bought anything online, you know that most Net stores ask for your e-mail address. Many of them also ask you to check a box if you're interested in hearing about special offers – that's an example of permission or opt-in marketing.

It's also permission marketing when a McDonald's counterperson asks, "Doyouwantfrieswiththat?" Because you have already ordered a Big Mac, so the logic goes, you have implicitly stated that you could be interested in other products.

Seth Godin, chief marketer at Yahoo and author of Permission Marketing, would be the first to admit there's nothing intrinsically new about the premise of his book. That said, Godin asserts that in the Internet Economy, permission marketing is perhaps the only thing that can save us from being buried under a mountain of spam.

In Godin's view, permission marketing is good for advertisers because, in an increasingly cluttered world, it ensures that consumers will be more open to an advertiser's pitch. Individual pitches will be more relevant, expected and, thus, welcomed. For the same reasons, permission marketing should be good for consumers. This is the way it's supposed to work, anyway.

The picture gets cloudy when you consider how marketers really do business. Consider, for example, last year's Federal Trade Commission complaint against GeoCities. If GeoCities members failed to check a box opting out of marketing offers, they were assumed to have given permission to accept ads not only from GeoCities, but from all the companies to which the company sold its marketing information. GeoCities denied any dirty tricks, although it did agree to revise its disclosure policies.

After all, in the new world of marketing, Godin says, what you do with your customers' data is just as important as getting it in the first place.

– Maria De La O

OTHER NEW TITLES OF INTEREST

The Alchemy of Growth
By Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley and David White (Perseus Books, $28)
Three McKinsey & Co. consultants outline the three horizons of sustainable growth.

Digital Capitalism
By Dan Schiller (MIT Press, $30)
A skeptical look at the Net's evolution from military-industrial network to capitalist tool.

Trust in Cyberspace
Edited by Fred B. Schneider (National Academy Press, $45)
A major military-intelligence study of the security and reliability of the nation_s _networked information systems.

---

Customer Reviews

This book changed my career
This book changed my career - ever since reading it I've pushed the surf company that I work for to adopt the marketing tactics that are so eloquently laid out in this book. We have just gotten to a level now where we're ready to begin implementing those concepts and a lot of people at work are very excited about the prospect of increasing our sales.

The entire concept of permission marketing seems like a natural way to rise above the noise of traditional interruption marketing techniques and Seth lays it out in a manner that's not only informative, but it's also fun to read.

Another aspect of this book that I like a lot is that it's such a trip down memory lane - Seth goes into the histories of a large number of Web 1.0 Internet startups and talks about their attempts at using Internet marketing. The fact that this guy was able to make so many nuanced observations back in the early years of the World Wide Web is a credit to his foresight and natural marketing capabilities. I highly recommend this book to anyone running (or in my case, helping run) a small business.

Good read
Nutshell review - A good read written in a easy to read style. Good insights and ideas. Worth reading.

Great Book So Far, Especially for Realtors!
Not done reading it yet, however, so far it is just what I expected and great for Realtors!