Business Book Review: Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

Godin goes where too many marketers avoid. Showing how the less travelled path of permission marketing is the key to long-term trust.

My Rating: ★★★★

Length: 287 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Released: 2012

Key Takeaway for Personal Branding

Seth Godin skilfully disrupted the norms of the marketing industry with Permission Marketing. A decade on from its first release, this Godin hit remains as relevant as ever.

Interruption Marketing

As Godin reminds us, for the better part of the past century, marketers have practised ‘interruption marketing’. Which aims to interrupt the audience in what they are doing to get them to pay attention to something.

We throw money at often immeasurable marketing efforts. Only to be part of one of the 3,000 marketing messages the average consumer is estimated to see per day.

Permission Marketing

Permission marketing as an alternative instead contains three elements:

• Anticipated: People look forward to hearing from you.

• Personal: The messages are directly related to the individual.

• Relevant: The marketing is about something the prospect is interested in.

It argues that trust and frequency over time is more important than reach and fleeting moments of impact.

Two Ways to Get Married

In a brilliantly simple analogy, Godin compares interruption and permission marketing in the context of dating. Likening the Interruption Marketer to marching up to the nearest person in the singles bar to propose marriage. As opposed to the Permission Marketer who dates someone several times, over many months before proposing.

Post the industrial revolution, and the advent of mass marketing, Godin invites us back to an old world of marketing. Where business was personal. And like a farmer, we planted seeds with individuals that grew over time.

Favourite Quotes

A Permission Marketer goes on a date. If it goes well, the two of them go on another date. And then another. Until, after ten or twelve dates, both sides can really communicate with each other about their needs and desires. After twenty dates they meet each other’s families. Finally, after three or four months of dating, the Permission Marketer proposes marriage.

Mass media is dead, long love niche media!

Permission Marketing cuts through the clutter and allows a marketer to speak to prospects as friends, not strangers.

Permission Marketing requires patience. Permission Marketing campaigns grow over time—the opposite of what most marketers look for these days. And Permission Marketing requires a leap of faith. Even a bad interruption campaign gets some results right away, while a permission campaign requires infrastructure and a belief in the durability of the permission concept before it blossoms with success.

Trust, it turns out, is not an event. You can’t go from anonymity to trusted brand in a day. Instead it’s a step-by-step process that requires time and money and commitment.

Frequency and trust outweigh reach.

Most marketers practice Interruption Marketing. The difference is simple. An Interruption Marketer is a hunter. A Permission Marketer is a farmer.

In Permission Marketing, Godin once again demonstrates why he’s one of the world’s most respected marketing voices.

Godin bravely goes where most traditional marketers would prefer to avoid. Away from all of the perceived glamour of mass advertising. Into territory that puts the power of permission in the consumers’ hands. Where your permission can be cancelled in a heartbeat. And knowing that makes your business better.

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin: Available on Amazon.