Permission Marketing

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

Review

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

Chapter List

Foreword by Don Peppers
Introduction

ONE: The Markething Crisis That Money Won't Solve

TWO: Permission Marketing - The Way to Make Advertising Work Again

THREE:The Evolution of Mass Advertising

FOUR:Getting Started - Focus on Share of Customer, Not Market Share

FIVE:How Frequency Builds Trust and Permission Facilitates Frequency

SIX:The Five Levels of Permission

SEVEN:Working with Permission as a Commodity

EIGHT:Everything You Know About Marketing on the Web Is Wrong!

NINE:Permission Marketing in the Context

TEN:Case Studies

ELEVEN: How to Evaluate a Permission Marketing Program

TWELVE: The Permission FAQ

Acknowledgments