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Permission Marketing Book Review
Permission Marketing Book Review
Michael L. Strack
Arkansas State University
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Permission Marketing Book Review
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Businesses and customers have a relationship. I know that. I think that everyone
is at least somewhat aware of that fact. But before now, I didn’t really think about it in
terms of a personal relationship. And according to Permission Marketing, neither do
traditional marketers. Marketers who use permission marketing techniques on the other
hand, make it their duty to create personal relationships with their customers. The book
explains that this is truly the way to market business and products successfully. In this
review I will again pull my favorite excerpts from the book and explain why they spoke
to me.
“As clutter has increased, advertisers have responded by increasing clutter”
(Kindle location 218). This is something that I never stopped to notice until it was
pointed out to me. Today, people are so conditioned to ignore just about anything that
sounds like it could be an advertisement or sales pitch that they automatically tune them
out. Advertisers know this. And how do typical advertisers respond? By adding even
more commercials to try to break through the clutter, even though all they are doing is
adding to the problem. It is a vicious circle of what the author calls “interruption
marketing.” To me, permission marketing makes so much more sense. Why add to the
clutter when you can bypass it altogether and make a real connection with a customer?
“The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they
spend” (Kindle location 354). This is the catch-22 of mass advertising. The more
advertising dollars that are spent to get the desired message out there, the more clutter
there is for consumers to wade through. This clutter dilutes the effectiveness of the
advertisement, so more money is spent on making the campaign bigger. I think this is
probably the fundamental problem with how most marketing and advertising is done
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today. If you spend more money to expand your reach, so do your competitors. And the
problem simply continues to grow, making it harder and harder to reach your customers.
All of this happens at the consumer’s expense. I don’t think that inundating and
annoying potential customers with ads is the best business model for attracting
customers. I can see why it is used, though. It is definitely the easiest way for large
companies with large budgets to reach a large audience. But imagine how successful a
big corporation could be if it put all those advertising dollars into permission marketing
techniques. I agree with the author that it would work out much better in the long run.
“…Your Permission Marketing campaign is turning strangers into friends
and friends into customers” (Kindle location 405). I think one reason that this spoke
to me and why I like the concept of permission marketing is that I come from a small
business background. In my father’s business, the customer-business relationship is a
fairly intimate one. I can identify with permission marketing because I have seen it used,
and work well. Customers are treated as an indispensable asset, not a number or a quota.
We still have customers that have been with us since before I was born, and that didn’t
happen because we told them they should buy our awesome paper. A similar excerpt
compares permission marketing to dating, and this is a great analogy. Things start out
slow, with both sides having to figure each other out. Nothing will ever come of the
relationship unless a level of trust is built between the two. When this trust is gained and
the friendship is maintained and curated carefully, the relationship (and the customer’s
purchases) can span a lifetime.
“An Interruption Marketer looks for a job by sending a résumé to one
thousand strangers. A Permission Marketer gets a job by focusing on one company
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and networking with it…” (Kindle location 474). I have rarely found things in our
assigned books that I disagree with, but this excerpt struck me as a little odd. If this is
simply a metaphor and not meant to be taken literally, then I suppose it works. But if this
was meant as a serious example, I am not sure how I feel about it. I assume most people
don’t actually send their résumé to one thousand people. But I also do not think that
latching on to one company and no other is a good strategy either.
“Ask most sentient humans and they’ll tell you Amazon is a bookstore on the
web…Most industry book chains should begin to see a looming threat” (Kindle
location 653, 674). I just thought this was funny. This book definitely shows it’s age
talking about how Amazon is a budding online bookstore, compared to what it has
become today. And the author made a good prediction saying it would threaten brick and
mortar bookstores, whether he knew it or not!
“Instead of focusing on ads that work, they focus on ads that are cool”
(Kindle location 875). “The only person who should decide when you change your
advertising is your accountant” (Kindle location 879). I grouped these two together
because the first sounds like a problem I could run into myself if I wasn’t paying
attention, and the second offers a solution to the problem. As a designer, I am always
chasing that next great design idea. That cool new thing I thought of halfway through a
different project. I can understand where this problem would come from within a
creative team. But the second excerpt offers a great solution that I wholeheartedly agree
with. Let the accountant handle when to change an ad! They see the numbers coming in
from a campaign. Sure an ad may be stale, but if that stale ad is still steadily increasing
sales, why add something new and unfamiliar?
Permission Marketing Book Review
I really liked the spin this book took on marketing. Between this book and the
others I have read this semester, I think I have learned more about marketing than from
all of my other marketing classes. The concept of turning strangers into friends and
friends into customers really hit home with me due to the personal nature of the family
business I have been an active part of over the last few years. Humans thrive on
relationships. In today’s consumer culture, it just makes sense that the best way to gain
new customers and retain existing ones would be to turn it into a more personal
relationship.
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Permission Marketing Book Review
Sources
Godin, S. (1999). Permission marketing: Turning strangers into friends, and friends into
customers. New York: Simon & Schuster.