Customer Reviews

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mr.Godin is an excellent teacher of how to market effectively. Before reading this I thought of marketing probably like most do. I thought to be successful in marketing and advertising, that big was the way to go...big magazine ads, t.v. spots, target a large audience and you're sure to get lots of customers, etc. WRONG!

Mr. Godin hits the bull's-eye on the type of marketing that it takes to acquire and keep customers in your business. It is not mass marketing to anyone and everyone that's going to do it. But rather, Mr. Godin shows you how to set up a specific strategy, a clever method in which to acquire the type of customer you want to your particular business. If you own a sports shop, then your ideal customer wouldn't be a chef or a construction worker who just happened to walk into your store...it would be the die-hard, sports enthusiast that you want to attract. Mr. Godin shows you how to attract your "ideal" customer; He teaches you how to get your ideal customer to come to you.

I didn't fully understand all that "Permission Marketing" was really about until Mr. Godin broke it down and explained it to a tee. If you can get a potential customer to say "yes" to you prior to the sale, your chances of acquiring them as an actual customer dramatically increases. This is what Mr. Godin shows you how to do. He is a wise marketer and you can be too! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

While Godin astutely details the need to build relationships with customers, that's been amply covered by other authors. My main beefs with this book are its dismissal of all forms of "traditional advertising" and its specious claim that offering prospects incentives is revolutionary. Wasn't John Caples offering how-to booklets to ad respondents sixty years ago?

However, Godin frames these tried-and-true techniques within the context of the Information Age, offering helpful examples of relationship marketing using e-mail, the Net, databases and the like. That may be particularly useful to business-to-business marketers. But anyone marketing to consumers should beware...brand story, great copywriting and broad visibility do matter still.

This is a poorly written book with an interesting concept but it contains minimal content and is full of repetition. I was very disappointed by this book.

Until now, most marketing books I've read have been filled with too much hype and over-simplified concepts, rather than concrete ideas. This book was a very welcome change !! The perfect balance of abstract concepts, motivational antecdotes, and hard-core ideas. My only complaint is that it was too short - left me wanting more ! As a matter of fact, the reason I'm here is to look for more books by this author. He has definitely obtained my "permission" to be marketed to !

Everyday your letterbox is full of leaflets you never read, your banker send you a new financial proposal you already have in your portfolio... All these papers will go directly to the trash can, but interrupt your customer's life: time, privacy and peace of mind. This is the waste created by the "interruption marketing", which is not using correctly customers' databases or is bombarding TV spots you do not watch during film breaks.

Is this time over? Not sure when you see all e-mails or phone calls you receive to promote products of no interest for you. How to get your Attention in the middle of this information overload? Simply by asking your permission.

Seth Godin, who created Internet marketer Yoyodyne and sold it in 1998 to Yahoo, where he is a vice president is explaining to us how to do it in "Permission Marketing". With practical examples he shows us how to start a relationship with a customer by offering added value. Main ideas are around personalization, long-term relationship and truth building. Customer then is expecting information from you focused on his own needs. The challenge is to move from market share to customer share.

But how is this possible? The use of New Information Technologies and Internet allows a one to one communication with a customer with focused information and at a low price. This is really the contribution from "New Economy" and Permission Marketing is giving the keys to understand how these New Information Technologies allow focusing on a customer more and more demanding. The traditional marketing is moving quickly to One to One marketing.

Do not read Permission Marketing if you want to lose your customers to the profit of your competitor knowing how to build long-term relationship with them. If you add One to One from Don & Martha Peppers to your readings, you will be well prepared to succeed in front of the marketing shift arriving with the "New Economy".

In addition to working in the profession of advertising and marketing, I'm an adjunct professor at a nearby university. I taught Seth's principles in my course on Direct Marketing last semester, and I intend to teach his principles in my course on Fundamentals of Advertising this semester. In fact, I intend to teach his material in every class I have that's even remotely related. Frankly, I think Seth's material should be taught in every university throughout the land -- and shouted from the rooftops amongst those in my profession.

Simply put, the material in this book -- deceptively clever, succinct and, at times, humorous -- is explosive. I say deceptive because if you don't "get" what Seth's trying to tell you, I imagine it would be possible for you to dismiss the entire concept as shallow or gimmicky. However, I believe this information represents nothing less than the future of advertising and marketing. You will ignore it at your own peril.

One of the biggest thrills for me was hearing my students put into use Seth's Permission Marketing phrase "Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers" -- even months after the class ended!

Not only is that a testament to the clarity and brevity of Seth's ideas, it's also the distillation of his book's premise.

For in today's world, we're bombarded by no less than 3,000 paid advertising messages per day. There's no way we can assimilate, remember and act on that many messages. No matter how creative they may be. It's no longer a matter of breaking through the clutter with killer creative; it's now a battle for one of the most precious commodities we're left with: our attention. And advertisers lose that battle every single minute of every day.

Therefore, agencies who seek ever more creative (and expensive!) creative approaches to help boost their clients' sales would do well to read Permission Marketing. Clients who whip their agencies mercilessly, sometimes changing them as often as they change their underwear (because they just aren't seeing the results they expected), would do well to read Seth's Permission Marketing book. BEFORE they blow millions of dollars looking for the next 15-minutes of fame for their advertisement.

Odds are, it ain't gonna happen.

Permission Marketing clearly describes the problem and equally as clearly provides the answer: ask permission first. Then only send your advertisement to those who ask to see it. Reduced to a catchphrase, what you need to do is turn strangers into friends and friends into customers through the power of direct marketing.

Since my field of expertise IS direct marketing, I grasped immediately what Seth was saying. I "got" it. And I know as sure as I know my own name that what he writes is rock-solid, essential information.

The only critical point I'd make is that right now Seth's ideas have a chance to work. And maybe work for a decade or two into the future. But what happens when even those who have given "permission" to receive advertising messages don't have time to read all the messages they've given permission to receive? I'm a great example of that. I've given permission to receive about a dozen online e-newsletters. (In direct marketing parlance, I've "opted in.") However, I simply don't have time to wade through them all. (Truth be told, the only one I read -- and look forward to -- on a regular basis is Seth's.) So not all permission is created equal. I imagine as people get even more busy that even those advertisers with whom they have a relationship will begin to see a drop-off in response.

But until that time, Permission Marketing should be required reading for all university students, direct marketers (who likely already know its simple, yet powerful message), advertisers, marketers and clients.

Once you "get" what Seth is saying, you'll never look at advertising the same way again!