The 9 to 5 Alternative

This is a review of Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. I am participating in the Personal MBA project, and this is the seventh book that I have completed and compiled notes for. To read more about my involvement with PMBA, click here.

Book Details
Title: Permission Marketing
Author: Seth Godin
Page Count: 256
First Published: 1999

Many of the big companies will stick to their knitting and remain faithful to the marketing methods that got them where they are today. This creates mammoth opportunities for new companies, for companies with nothing to lose, for companies with the flexibility and initiative to try a very different way of gaining and keeping customers.

Seth Godin, if you haven’t heard, is a marketing master. He’s written eleven books on the subject, runs the most popular marketing blog in the world, and for years has provided insight and depth to a continuously evolving realm of business. At the time of this book’s printing, Seth’s company Yoyodyne, the first internet-marketing company, was acquired by Yahoo. In 2006 Godin launched Squidoo, the 240th most popular website on the Internet and in 2008 he spearheaded a six-month alternative MBA program for 9 participants. Seth Godin is smart and prolific, and if you’re interested in business certainly someone worth paying attention to.

Permission Marketing, one of his first books, was published in 1999 and provided a fresh look at how individuals and organizations can better approach potential customers.

Click here to receive the first four chapters of Permission Marketing (one-third of the book) for free!

What I Learned

The fundamental concept in Permission Marketing is this: instead of merely interrupting people with traditional advertisements and focusing on maximizing the number of customers you have, “ask permission” from people to market–develop a relationship with your customers and focus on their life-time value as participants in whatever message you are trying to spread.

Marketers today face a number of problems. Higher quality products make it harder for us to distinguish amongst brands, and advertising clutter makes us less and less willing to pay attention. When was the last time you really heard a radio commercial or read a magazine advertisement?

While traditional “interruption marketing” is about the moment, about hunting for customers, “permission marketing” is about the process, about farming for customers in the long-term. By being obvious and clear with your marketing, by giving away products/services for free and using promotions with relevant overlay, you become better positioned to “turn strangers into friends, friends into customers.”

Like all of Godin’s books, his concept isn’t particularly difficult to digest. Permission Marketing is a quick and interesting read, especially if you think about how far ahead of the game he was, talking about all this stuff over 10 years ago!

If you missed the link above, click here to receive the first four chapters for free.

Notable Quotations

Each of us is born with only a certain amount of time on this earth, and figuring out how to use it wisely is one of life’s primary activities. (p. 10)

Every idle moment you possess is seen by some business somewhere as an opportunity to interrupt you and demand more of your attention. (p.13)

The cost of making a first-rate TV commercial is actually far more, per minute, than that of producing a major Hollywood motion picture. (p.32)

Permission Marketers are totally obvious about their objectives with the consumer. They make it crystal clear what they will be doing with the data they collect and exactly why it’s beneficial to the consumer to give this data.

“Do you want fries with that?” are perhaps the six most profitable situational permission marketing words in history.

Every communication must be crafted with the goal of ensuring that it’s not the last one. (p. 142)

…testing works best when you assume nothing. (p. 237)

Miscellaneous Notes

-the current American education system is modeled after an Industrial Revolution-type assembly line

-the word “spam” (referring to junk e-mail) comes from a Monty Python sketch in which everything on the menu includes Spam

-in 1999…for $100, a marketer could buy 6 million pieces of email, addressed and delivered (yikes)

-Godin raves about Amazon.com [great example of a company focused on permission marketing]

-Godin refers to Microsoft.com having a horrible web design in 1999–check it out here

Have you read this book? What are your thoughts?