Permission Marketing: Amazon.ca: Seth Godin: Books

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Customer Reviews

111 Reviews

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3 star:		(9)
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Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (111 customer reviews)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars OUCH!, Jun 13 2000

By

Kerry Randall - See all my reviews

This review is from: Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers (Audio Cassette)

I read fifty or more books a year, one-third of them about marketing. That is what I do for a living. This book is, by far, the worst material I've ever slogged through. This book is 200 pages of poorly supported examples, contradictions, hyperbole, and erroneous conclusions. For example: Ivory soap, made with coconut oil, was a smashing success; coconut oil was in limited supply so Proctor and Gamble scrambled for four years to create a new product that would use MORE coconut oil as a solution to the limited supply problem! Uh, what did I miss?

The book is rife with such statements as: Cadillac buyers being "a tough to reach audience." Ever consider automobile registration data bases? The names and addresses can be had for pennies each. What's "tough to reach" about pennies?

Seth Godin proposes "interruption" marketing is destined for failure. It probably is. He says it doesn't work anymore and that's why American car-makers can't sell cars. Uh. I thought they were selling a lot of them. He says their interruption advertising doesn't work. Americans buy more American-made cars per capita than any nation buys any car per capita. The audience is hooked on new cars. That's a failure?

I am tempted to go on and on with more than one hundred examples of conclusions that are not supported by the facts. I won't. Just one more.

Seth says Internet banners don't work. Okay, I agree. How did Seth build his company, Yoyodyne?

"1. Attract target customers with banner ads promising a great prize. Interested consumers get more information by clicking on the banner, which takes them to a registration page."

And that paragraph (about interruption advertising) is in the chapter on case studies showing how permission marketing works!

The funny thing is that permission marketing works. It's an old concept, been with us for thousands of years. This book presents nothing new, nothing informative, certainly nothing to take back to the office. There is no meat to this sizzle.

Permission Marketing got my permission through my purchase of the book. Seth Godin then abused me for three hours. It's the last time he'll get my permission.

It should be sufficient to say, if you can read, don't bother to read this book.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Dead solid wrong, Oct 3 2003

By

Kit Kat (Knee deep in silage, somewhere in Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers (Hardcover)

The suggestion that the old is out and the new, permission marketing, is in has been so thoroughly disproved by actual experience that it's reasonable to ask, just why does anyone believe there is anything behind that screen that a little tiny man pretending to be the Wizard?

A few marketers tried to implement these ideas and found they had offended far more people than traditional advertisers ever had. For that reason, this books ranks with books touting Day Trading as the route to riches. No, never: nonsense.

I couldn't even bear to offer this to a used bookstore. Instead, we used it as kindling for a fire. Expensive, but the result was good, and perhaps better than a PrestoLog.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars No news, Aug 29 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers (Hardcover)

While Godin does a good job retelling an old story about properly targeting, utilizing appropriate messaging and benefiting from modern (post-internet) media, it is not new. Some of his retelling is convoluted in endless metaphores. And, as this book was written before 9/11 and the dot-bomb, much of it is out-of-date and of reduced relevance.

There are more helpful and current books out there about internet and other direct-marketing topics.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting look back... and forward.
It is interesting to see what has come true and how so much of what Godin writes about still applies more than a decade after being published.

Published 14 months ago by Raj Boora

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
I "stumbled" in to Search Engine Marketing and now "do it" for a living with car dealerships in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more