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Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers Hardcover – May 6, 1999
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Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.
Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity—time—Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMay 6, 1999
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 7.5 inches
- ISBN-100684856360
- ISBN-13978-0684856360
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Godin knows his stuff. He created Internet marketer Yoyodyne and sold it in 1998 to Yahoo!, where he is a vice president. Godin delves into the strategies of several companies that successfully practice permission marketing, including Amazon.com, American Airlines, Bell Atlantic, and American Express. Permission marketing works best on the Internet, he writes, because the medium eliminates costs such as envelopes, printing, and stamps. Instead of advertising with a plain banner ad on the Internet, you should focus on discovering the customer's problem and getting permission to follow up with e-mail, he writes. Permission Marketing is an important and valuable book for businesses seeking better results from their advertising. --Dan Ring
Review
Business Week Seth Godin is the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age.
Robert Tercek Senior Vice-President, Sony Pictures Entertainment The principles of Permission Marketing are incredibly valuable to everyone involved in media today.
Lester Wunderman Chairman-Emeritus of Wunderman Cato Johnson, the largest direct-marketing firm in the world; author of Being Direct. Advertisers are going to have to learn how to deliver messages with frequency and low cost if they are to cope with the increasing competition for the consumer's attention. Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a big idea.
William C. Taylor Founding Editor, Fast Company Godin and his colleagues are working to persuade some of the most powerful companies in the world to reinvent how they relate to their customers. His argument is as stark as it is radical: Advertising just doesn't work as well as it used to -- in part because there's so much of it, in part because people have learned to ignore it, in part because the rise of the Net means that companies can go beyond it.
Mark Kwamme CEO, CKS Group Permission Marketing is a testament to Godin's profound grasp of digital marketing. "Interruption Marketers" everywhere would do well to read this book.
Eric Hippeau Chaiman, Ziff-Davis, Inc. Finally, here's a measurable method for marketing in a world filled with clutter.
From the Back Cover
Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.
Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity -- time -- Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.
In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of Permission Marketing:
1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating?
2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?
3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about yourproducts?
4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?
And in numerous informative case studies, including American Airlines' frequent-flier program, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!, Godin demonstrates how marketers are already profiting from this key new approach in all forms of media.
About the Author
Recognized as the pioneer of Permission Marketing, Godin is a sought-after speaker on the conference circuit, having presented at the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference, Jupiter events, and ICE, as well as international marketing forums. Last year, Godin was one of the highest ranked speakers, among 403 presenters at Internet World. He is a featured speaker at Fall, Spring and Summer I-Worlds. Godin is also the recipient of the 1998 Momentum Award, honoring outstanding Internet industry accomplishments.
Godin received an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School in 1984. Prior to graduating from Tufts University in 1982 with a degree in both Computer Science and Philosophy, Godin co-founded and ran one of the largest student-run businesses in the coutnry. From 1983 to 1986 he worked as a brand manager at Spinnaker Software, where he led the team that developed the first generation of multimedia products, working with such forward-thinkers as Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton. He managed 40 engineers and introduced more than 60 software and video products to the marketplace.
Godin is the author and co-author of a number of top-selling business books, including E-Marketing, the first book ever published on how to do business online; The Guerilla Marketing Handbook, part of the best-selling Guerilla Marketing series; The Information Please Business Almanacm, a ground-breaking business reference book; and Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Freinds, and Friends into Customers.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
You're not paying attention. Nobody is.
It's not your fault. It's just physically impossible for you to pay attention to everything that marketers expect you to -- like the 17,000 new grocery store products that were introduced last year or the $1,000 worth of advertising that was directed exclusively at you last year.
Is it any wonder that consumers feel as if the fast-moving world around them is getting blurry? There's TV at the airport, advertisements in urinals, newsletters on virtually every topic, and a cellular phone wherever you go.
This is a book about the attention crisis in America and how marketers can survive and thrive in this harsh new environment. Smart marketers have discovered that the old way of advertising and selling products isn't working as well as it used to, and they're searching aggressively for a new, enterprising way to increase market share and profits. Permission Marketing is a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising and customers.
THERE'S NO MORE ROOM FOR ALL THESE ADVERTISEMENTS!
I remember when I was about five years old and started watching television seriously. There were only three main channels -- 2, 4, and 7, plus a public channel and UHF channel for when you were feeling adventuresome. I used to watch Ultraman every day after school on channel 29.
With just five channels to choose from, I quickly memorized the TV schedule. I loved shows like The Munsters, and I also had a great time with the TV commercials. Charlie the Tuna, Tony the Tiger, and those great board games that seemed magically to come alive all vied for my attention. And they got it.
As I grew up, it seemed as though everyone I met was part of the same community. We saw the same commercials, bought the same stuff, discussed the same TV shows. Marketing was in a groove -- if you invented a decent product and put enough money into TV advertising, you could be pretty sure you'd get shelf space in stores. And if the ads were any good at all, people bought the products.
About ten years ago I realized that a sea change was taking place. I had long ago ceased to memorize the TV schedules, I was unable to keep up with all the magazines I felt I should be reading, and with new alternatives like Prodigy and a book superstore, I fell hopelessly behind in my absorption of media.
I found myself throwing away magazines unopened. I was no longer interested enough in what a telemarketer might say to hesitate before hanging up. I discovered that I could live without hearing every new Bob Dylan album and that while there were plenty of great restaurants in New York City, the ones near my house in the suburbs were just fine.
The clutter, as you know, has only gotten worse. Try counting how many marketing messages you encounter today. Don't forget to include giant brand names on T-shirts, the logos on your computer, the Microsoft start-up banner on your monitor, radio ads, TV ads, airport ads, billboards, bumper stickers, and even the ads in your local paper.
For ninety years marketers have relied on one form of advertising almost exclusively. I call it Interruption Marketing. Interruption, because the key to each and every ad is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in order to get them to think about something else.
INTERRUPTION MARKETING -- THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO GETTING CONSUMER ATTENTION
Almost no one goes home eagerly anticipating junk mail in their mailbox. Almost no one reads People magazine for the ads. Almost no one looks forward to a three-minute commercial interruption on must see TV.
Advertising is not why we pay attention. Yet marketers must make us pay attention for the ads to work. If they don't interrupt our train of thought by planting some sort of seed in our conscious or subconscious, the ads fall. Wasted money. If an ad falls in the forest and no one notices, there is no ad.
You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action. That's quite a lot to ask of thirty seconds of TV time or twenty-five square inches of the newspaper, but without interruption there's no chance for action, and without action advertising flops.
As the marketplace for advertising gets more and more cluttered, it becomes increasingly difficult to interrupt the consumer. Imagine you're in an empty airport, early in the morning. There's hardly anyone there as you stroll leisurely toward your plane.
Suddenly someone walks up to you and says, "Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to gate seven?" Obviously you weren't hoping for, or expecting, someone to come up and ask this question, but since he looks nice enough and you've got a spare second, you interrupt your train of thought and point him on his way.
Now imagine the same airport, but it's three in the afternoon and you're late for your flight. The terminal is crowded with people, all jostling for position. You've been approached five times by various faux charities on your way to the gate, and to top it all off you've got a headache.
Same guy comes up to you and asks the same question. Odds are, your response will be a little different. If you're a New Yorker, you might ignore him altogether. Or you may stop what you were doing, say "Sorry," and then move on.
A third scenario is even worse. What if he's the fourth, or the tenth, or the one hundredth person who's asked you the same question? Sooner or later you're going to tune out the interruptions. Sooner or later it all becomes background noise.
Well, your life is a lot like that airport scene. You've got too much to do and not enough time to get it done. You're being accosted by strangers constantly. Every day you're exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And it's getting increasingly harder and harder to find a little peace and quiet.
The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more!
That's right. Over the last thirty years advertisers have dramatically increased their ad spending. They've also increased the noise level of their ads -- more jump cuts, more in-your-face techniques -- and searched everywhere for new ways to interrupt your day.
Thirty years ago clothing did not carry huge logos. Commercial breaks on television were short. Magazines rarely had three hundred pages of ads (as many computer magazines do today). You could even watch PBS without seeing several references to the "underwriter."
As clutter has increased, advertisers have responded by increasing clutter. And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.
CONSUMERS ARE SPENDING LESS TIME SEEKING ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS
In addition to clutter, there's another problem facing marketers. Consumers don't need to care as much as they used to. The quality of products has increased dramatically. It's increased so much, in fact, that it doesn't really matter which car you buy, which coffee maker you buy, or which shirt you buy. They're all a great value, and they're all going to last a good long while.
We've also come a long way as consumers. Ninety years ago it was unusual to find a lot of brand-name products in a consumer's house. Ninety years ago we made stuff, we didn't buy it. Today, however, we buy almost everything. Canned goods. Bread. Perked coffee. Even water. As a result, we already have a favorite brand of almost everything. If you like your favorite brand, why invest time in trying to figure out how to switch?
We're not totally locked in, of course. It wasn't too long ago that cake mix was a major innovation. Just a few years ago we needed to make major decisions about which airline was going to be our supplier of frequent flier miles. And today, if you're going to get health care, you've got to make a serious choice. But more often than not, you've already made your decisions and you're quite happy with them.
When was the last time someone launched a major new manufacturer of men's suits? Or a large nationwide chain of department stores? Or a successful new nationwide airline? Or a fast-food franchise? It can be done, certainly, but it doesn't happen very often. One of the reasons it's such a difficult task is that we're pretty satisfied as consumers.
If the deluge of new products ceased tomorrow, almost no one would mind. How much more functional can a T-shirt get? Except for fast-moving industries like computers, the brands we have today are good enough to last us for years and years. Because our needs as consumers are satisfied, we've stopped looking really hard for new solutions.
Yet because of the huge profits that accrue to marketers who do invent a successful new brand, a new killer product, a new category, the consumer is deluged with messages. Because it's not impossible to get you to switch from MCI to Sprint, or from United Airlines to American Airlines, or from Reebok to Nike, marketers keep trying. It's estimated that the average consumer sees about one million marketing messages a year -- about 3,000 a day.
That may seem like a lot, but one trip to the supermarket alone can expose you to more than 10,000 marketing messages! An hour of television might deliver forty or more, while an issue of the newspaper might have as many as one hundred. Add to that all the logos, wallboards, junk mail, catalogs, and unsolicited phone calls you have to process every day, and it's pretty easy to hit that number. A hundred years ago there wasn't even a supermarket, there wasn't a TV show, and there weren't radio stations.
MASS MEDIA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE NICHE MEDIA!
Technology and the marketplace have also brought the consumer a glut of ways to be exposed to advertising. When the FCC ruled the world of television, there were only three networks and a handful of independents. Networks made a fortune because they were the only game in town. Now there are dozens -- and, in some areas, hundreds -- of TV channels to choose from.
The final episode of Seinfeld made media headlines. Yet thirty years ago Seinfeld's ratings wouldn't have made Nielsen's list of top twenty-five shows of the season. With an almost infinite number of options, the chances of a broadcast, even a network broadcast, reaching almost everyone are close to zero.
Even worse is the World Wide Web. At last count there were nearly two million different commercial Web sites. That means there are about twenty-five people online for every single Web site...hardly a mass market of interest to an Interruption Marketer.
Alta Vista, one of the most complete and most visited search engines on the Internet, claims to have indexed 100 million pages. That means their computer has surfed and scanned 100 million pages of information, and if you do a search, that's the database you're searching through.
It turns out that in response to people who do searches online, Alta Vista delivers about 900 million pages a month. That means the average page that they have indexed in their search engine is called up exactly nine times a month. Imagine that. Millions of dollars invested in building snazzy corporate marketing sites and an average of nine people a month search for and find any given page of information on this search engine.
This is a very, very big haystack, and Interruption Marketers don't have that many needles.
Marketers have invested (and almost completely wasted) more than a billion dollars on Web sites as a way of cutting through the clutter. General Electric has a site with thousands of pages. Ziff-Davis offers a site with more than 250,000 pages! And a direct result of this attempt to cut through the clutter is the most cluttered, least effective marketing of all.
THE FOUR APPROACHES TO KEEPING MASS MARKETING ALIVE
A quick look at the newsstand at Barnes & Noble will confirm that the problem of clutter saturation isn't limited to electronic media. There are enough consumer magazines (ignoring the even larger category of trade magazines for a moment) to keep a reader busy reading magazines full-time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Obviously the mass market is dying. The vast splintering of media means that a marketer can't reach a significant percentage of the population with any single communication. That's one reason the Super Bowl can charge so much for advertisements. Big events are unique in their ability to deliver about half the consumers watching TV, so they're the perfect platform for Interruption Marketing aimed at the mass audience.
Other than buying even more traditional advertising, how are mass marketers dealing with this profound infoglut? They're taking four approaches:
1. First, they're spending more in odd places. Not just on traditional TV ads, but on a wide range of interesting and obscure media. Campbell's Soup bought ads on parking meters. Macy's spends a fortune on its parade. Kellogg's has spent millions building a presence on the World Wide Web -- a fascinating way to sell cereal.
Companies have seen that a mass market broadcast strategy isn't working as well as it used to, especially when targeting the hard-to-reach upper-income demographic. As this lucrative audience spends less time watching TV, marketers are working overtime trying to find media with less clutter, where their interruption techniques can be more effective.
Marketers hire Catalina Corporation to print their coupons on the back of receipts at the grocery store. They buy ads on the floor of the cereal aisle. There are ads atop taxis in New York City and on the boards around the rink at the hockey game. Fox even figured out a way to sell the rights to the small area over the catcher's shoulder, so TV viewers would see the ad throughout an entire baseball game.
2. The second technique is to make advertisements ever more controversial and entertaining. Coca-Cola hired talent agency CAA to enlist topflight Hollywood directors to make commercials. Candies features a woman sitting on a toilet in its magazine ads (for shoes!). Spike Lee's ad agency did more than $50 million in billings last year.
Of course, as the commercials try harder to get your attention, the clutter becomes even worse. An advertiser who manages to top a competitor for the moment has merely raised the bar. Their next ad will have to be even more outlandish in order to top the competition, not to mention their previous ad, to keep the consumer's attention.
The cost of making a first-rate TV commercial is actually far more, per minute, than that of producing a major Hollywood motion picture. Talking frogs, computer graphics, and intense editing now seem to be a requirement.
A side effect of the focus on entertainment is that it gives the marketer far less time to actually market. In a fifteen-second commercial (increasingly attractive as a cost-cutting way to interrupt people even more often), ten or even twelve seconds are devoted to getting your attention, while just a few heartbeats are reserved for the logo, the benefit, and the call to action.
Take the interruption challenge! Write down all the companies that ran commercials during your favorite TV show last night. Write down all the companies that paid good money to buy banners on the Web during your last surfing expedition. If you can list more than 10 percent of them, you're certainly the exception.
3. The third approach used to keep mass marketing alive is to change ad campaigns more often in order to keep them "interesting and fresh." Tony the Tiger and Charlie the Tuna and the Marlboro man are each worth billions of dollars in brand equity to the companies that built them. The marketers behind them have invested a fortune over the last forty years making them trusted spokesmen (or spokesanimals) for their brands.
Nike, on the other hand, just ran a series of ads without the swoosh, arguably one of the most effective logos of the last generation. Apple Computer changes its tag line annually. Wendy's and McDonald's and Burger King jump from one approach to the other, all hoping for a holy grail that captures attention.
In exchange for these brief bits of attention (remember the hoopla when they replaced Mikey on the Life box?) these marketers are trading in the benefits of a long-term brand recognition campaign. It's a trade they're willing to make, because Interruption Marketing requires it. Without attention, there is no ad.
4. The fourth and last approach, which is as profound as the other three, is that many marketers are abandoning advertising and replacing it with direct mail and promotions. Marketers now allocate about 52 percent of their annual ad budgets for direct mail and promotions, a significant increase over past years.Of the more than $200 billion spent on consumer advertising last year in the United States, more than $100 billion was spent on direct mail campaigns, in-store promotions, coupons, freestanding inserts, and other nontraditional media. Last year alone Wunderman, Cato, Johnson did more than $1.6 billion in billings for its clients (folks like AT&T).
The next time you get a glossy mailing for a Lexus or enter an instant win sweepstakes at the liquor store, you're seeing the results of this trend toward increased direct marketing efforts. Advertisers are using them because they work. They are somewhat more effective at interrupting you than an ad. They're somewhat more measurable than a billboard. Best of all, they give the marketers another tool to use in their increasingly frustrating fight against clutter. After all, there are only five or ten pieces of junk mail in your mailbox every day -- not 3,000. And another few feet of shelf space at the supermarket can lead to a dramatic upturn in sales.
DIRECT MARKETING BREAKS THROUGH THE CLUTTER, TEMPORARILY
Even though they work better than advertising, these techniques are astonishingly wasteful. A 2 percent response for a direct mail campaign will earn the smart marketer a raise at most companies. But a 2 percent response means that the same campaign was trashed, ignored, or rejected by an amazing 98 percent of the target audience! From the perspective of the marketer, however, if the campaign earns more than it costs, it's worth doing again.
Of course, just as suburbanites learned when they fled the city to avoid the crowds, if a strategy works, other people will be right on your heels. That bucolic countryside fills up rapidly with other people looking to get away from it all. Correspondingly, as each of these promotional media becomes measurably effective, every smart marketer rushes to join in. Finding a unique approach that cuts through the clutter is usually very short-lived.
Virtually every supermarket now charges a shelving allowance, for example, which manufacturers pay for if they want more shelf space for their products. Every liquor store is already jammed with promotions. Every mailbox in the country is brimming with catalogs for clothes, gardening equipment, and fountain pens.
Direct marketers are responding to this glut by using computers. With access to vast amounts of computerized customer information, marketers can collate and cross-reference a database of names to create a finely tuned mailing list and then send them highly targeted messages. For example, a direct marketer might discover that based on past results, the best prospects for its next campaign are single women who are registered Democrats, who make more than $58,000 a year, and who have no balance on their credit card. This information is easily available, and marketers are now racing to make their direct marketing ever more targeted.
Of course, database marketing is a weapon available to any marketer, so like all trends in Interruption Marketing, this one will soon lose its edge. When others jump in as well, the clutter will inevitably catch up.
The last frontier of Interruption Marketing appears to be exemplified by the movie Titanic. James Cameron showed the world that outspending any rational marketer will indeed cut through the clutter. Hollywood has jumped on this bandwagon with marketing campaigns for Godzilla and other films that at first glance can't possibly bring in enough ticket sales to justify the expense.
Nike uses the same approach to sell sneakers, and now this radical overspending strategy is being used by others, especially on the Internet. The thinking behind it is based on an all-or-nothing roll of the dice. Basically, because clutter is so pervasive, anyone who can successfully break through and create a new mass market product will reap huge rewards. And betting vast amounts of other people's money on that breakthrough is one way to play.
Of course, once there's a proven pattern that big spending can win, others in the category will jump in as well. The bar will be raised yet again, and the only winners will be the media companies that sell the airtime and ad space in the first place.
WHY AD AGENCIES DON'T WORK TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM
What about the ad agencies? With so many talented people, why aren't they working to solve this problem?
Unfortunately the clutter wars are taking their casualties at the agency side as well. The big agencies, the ones that could afford to take the lead in this challenge, are faced with three dismal problems:
1. First, clients are giving the agencies a much shorter leash. Leo Burnett used to keep clients for twenty or thirty years. Levi's stayed at FCB for sixty-eight years. That's so long that not one person at either company was probably born when the account work was started on Levi's.
Today, however, it's not unusual for a marketer to change agencies after two or three years. Companies that fired their ad agencies in the last year include Bank of America, Compaq, Goodyear, and many more.
2. The second problem is that the stock market has been conducive to agency consolidations. The best way to make money in advertising today is to buy ad agencies and take them public. As a result, some of the best minds in the business have been focusing on building agencies, not brands.
3. Last, the commission structure that every ad agency was built upon has been dramatically dismantled. Traditionally agencies were paid by media companies. They got to keep 15 percent of all the ad money the client spent on ad space in the form of a commission from the magazines and TV networks where they ran their ads. This meant that big clients could generate huge profits for the ad agencies, which funded work on new approaches to advertising as well as the innovative ads for new, smaller clients. But now the big guys have decided to put a stop to this subsidizing, and it's rare to find an ad agency that still gets a straight 15 percent commission on media buys for their big clients.
INTERRUPTION MARKETERS FACE A CATCH-22
To summarize the problem that faces the Interruption Marketer:
1. Human beings have a finite amount of attention.
You can't watch everything, remember everything, or do everything. As the amount of noise in your life increases, the percentage of messages that get through inevitably decreases.
2. Human beings have a finite amount of money.
You also can't buy everything. You have to choose. But because your attention is limited, you'll be able to choose only from those things you notice.
3. The more products offered, the less money there is to go around.
It's a zero sum game. Every time you buy a Coke, you don't buy a Pepsi. As the number of companies offering products increases, and as the number of products each company offers multiplies, it's inevitable that there will be more losers than winners.
4. In order to capture more attention and more money, Interruption Marketers must increase spending.
Spending less money than your competitors on advertising in a cluttered environment inevitably leads to decreased sales.
5. But this increase in marketing exposure costs big money.
Interruption Marketers have no choice but to spend a bigger and bigger portion of their company's budgets on breaking through the clutter.
6. But, as you've seen, spending more and more money in order to get bigger returns leads to ever more clutter.
7. Catch-22: The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend.
Is mass marketing due for a cataclysmic shakeout? Absolutely. A new form of marketing is changing the landscape, and it will affect Interruption Marketing as significantly as the automobile affected the makers of buggy whips.
Copyright © 1999 by Seth Godin
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (May 6, 1999)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0684856360
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684856360
- Item Weight : 13.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 7.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #174,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36 in Search Engine Optimization
- #160 in Customer Relations (Books)
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About the authors
Seth Godin is the author of 20 international bestsellers that have been translated into over 38 languages, and have changed the way people think about marketing and work. For a long time, Unleashing the Ideavirus was the most popular ebook ever published, and Purple Cow is the bestselling marketing book of the decade.
He worked as a year as the volunteer founding editor of The Carbon Almanac, and his recent bestsellers also include The Practice and This is Marketing.
He's a recent inductee to the Marketing Hall of Fame, and also a member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and (go figure), the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame.
His book, Tribes, was a nationwide bestseller, appearing on the Amazon, New York Times, BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. It's about the most powerful form of marketing--leadership--and how anyone can now become a leader, creating movements that matter.
His book Linchpin came out in 2008 and was the fastest-selling book of his career. Linchpin challenges you to stand up, do work that matters and race to the top instead of the bottom. More than that, though, the book outlines a massive change in our economy, a fundamental shift in what it means to have a job.
In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth was founder and CEO of Squidoo.com,. His blog (find it by typing "seth" into Google) is the most popular marketing blog in the world. Before his work as a writer and blogger, Godin was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, a job he got after selling them his pioneering 1990s online startup, Yoyodyne.
He's known as a pioneer in online education, and was the founder of the altMBA.
You can find every single possible detail that anyone could ever want to know at sethgodin.com
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I might have ignored this if it did not come up a second time.
"... Back to Muhammad Ali again. After he's hit someone ten times and the guy's still standing, the opportunity for a quick knockout is long gone. Only through persistence..."
If this is about illustrating `persistence' there are better examples. If this is about "boxing/Muhammad Ali AND persistence" it's a really bad example. Muhammad Ali averaged 9th round KOs. That was Ali's style. Mike Tyson averaged 3rd round KOs. That was Tyson's style. Indeed, Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds in one of the fastest KOs in the heavyweight division.
Whereas Ali took the time to dance with the "Ali Shuffle, to showboat, and even talk to his opponent, Tyson did what he came to do -without show (he sold the outcome). But there is a lesson to be learned. After some time Tyson's fights could not be sold in the United States anymore; most famously Tyson vs. Buster Douglas took place in Tokyo, because Americans weren't going to pay hundreds of dollars for what they thought would be a 90 seconds fight (Boxing is about entertainment too). Ali knew this. That is why boxing is such a bad example for the contents of this book. Any boxer, who pursues "selling the fight and going for a later round knock-out" risks injury and loss, but fighters, who go for the quick sale, cannot sell anymore after they have done this for a while. So, if the "message" is about winning, the strategy depends on the opponent, and that is why boxing is not a great example.
Aside from this flaw Seth Godin's book is a great book. His elaborations about permission marketing vs. traditional Interruption marketing are brilliant and I can only guess what a huge impact this book made in 1999. Even today students of marketing must be riveted to read about the historic developments in marketing, never mind that some of the quoted companies don't exist anymore. E.g. my children (in their early 20's), who know much more about phones than I will ever know, have never heard of MCI. Then again, maybe reading about MCI might prompt them to read up on who this former telecommunications company was and find out why it went down.
Of course telecommunication companies are notorious for their ridiculous approaches. For a short while I was Charter's customer. This company thought they can handle `permission marketing' their own way. Even though I told them that I wanted to buy Internet services only, and that I haven't had TV since 2009, and, that I did not intend to get TV because I find nothing worthy to watch, they called me every 10 days to offer me TV. So I cancelled them. At that occasion the customer service representative asked me why I cancelled their services and I told him that I felt harassed. To which he replied that I should have gotten on their no-call list. To which I replied, that no, the fact that they knew my phone number did not entitle them to call me anytime between 8-5 whenever they felt like it. Not even my mother calls me during working hours. Additionally, the fact that I told them more than 20 times in no uncertain terms that I was not interested in getting TV, clearly demonstrated that they were NOT listening to their customer. My new provider sends me "invitations to get TV" every 2 weeks, via snail mail. I throw their mail into my recycle bin.
Naturally, Seth Godin elaborates about telecommunications companies too, only he writes about Bell Atlantic, which today is Verizon. I wonder how many of the younger readers of this book know that.
The above is a perfect example of permission marketing gone wrong and I would hope that somebody from Charter's marketing department reads Seth Godin's book sometime soon. I really appreciated Seth Godin's elaborations about the "five levels of permission". Looking into my Inbox I can tell that many corporations' marketing departments have taken Seth Godin's advice to heart. Of course the downside of this is that most people simply delete their flood of emails and that's that. In fact email providers are developing programs to assist this process because people don't have enough time to unsubscribe the unwanted content.
Absolutely brilliant are Godin's mentioning of Columbia Record Club and the Book of the Months Club. Indeed it was these concepts that lay the foundation for brilliant permission marketing but we don't get to read too much about these great innovators anymore.
While I realize that the book is listed as "published in 1999" I had hoped that the book included some kind of an update, maybe a 3-5 page foreword would have been excellent. The way how it is presented "Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends Into Customers" is more of a history book than a cutting edge book. That kind of surprised me.
Gisela Hausmann, author & blogger
My copy was published in 1999, so as you might imagine a lot of things have changed since then. I read with a bit of historical amusement how AOL and ATT abused their permission marking program, pissed off their customers and forgot who they served. I was surprised that he didn't mention COMCAST, but their customer abuse might have been a bit later.
In retrospect, I could have probably passed on this book, but you never know until you get into it.
1- "As clutter has increased, advertisers have responded by increasing clutter. And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it."
2- "In addition to clutter, there's another problem facing marketers. Consumers don't need to care as much as they used to. The quality of products has increased dramatically It's increased so much, in fact, that it doesn't really matter which car you buy, which coffee maker you buy, or which shirt you buy They're all a great value, and they're all going to last a good long while."
3- "To summarize the problem that faces the Interruption Marketers: 1. Human beings have a finite amount of attention. 2. Human beings have a finite amount of money. The more products offered, the less money there is to go around. 4. In order to capture more attention and more money. Interruption Marketers must increase spending. 5. But this increase in marketing exposure costs b\ money. 6. But, as you've seen, spending more and more money in order to get bigger returns leads to ever more clutter. 7. Catch-22: The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend."
4- "Five Steps to Dating Your Customer: 1. Offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer 2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about your product or service. 3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission. 4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission from the consumer. 5. Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer behavior toward profits."
5- "Permission Marketing Is Anticipated, Personal, Relevant: 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."
6- "Permission Marketing is the tool that unlocks the power of the Internet. The leverage it bring to this new medium, combined with the pervasive clutter that infects the Internet and virtually every other medium, makes Permission Marketing the most powerful trend in marketing for the next decade."
7- "By focusing media on getting permission instead of making the ultimate sale, marketers are able to get far more out of their expenditures. The response rate to a free sample or c affinity program or a birthday club might be five or ten times the response rate of an ad asking for a sale."
8- "There are five levels of permission. The highest level of permission is called the "intravenous" level. The fifth and lowest is called the "situation" level. Here are the five levels in order of importance. 1. Intravenous (and "purchase-on-approval" model) 2. Points (liability model and chance model) 3. Personal relationships 4. Brand trust 5. Situation. There's a sixth level, but it's so low I won't even refer to it as a level at all. It's called spam (unsolicited advertising), and it's covered last."
9- "Once you have earned permission, you must keep it land attempt to expand it. These four rules go a long way to help marketers understand permission: 1. Permission is nontransferable. 2. Permission is selfish. 3. Permission is a process, not a moment. 4. Permission can be canceled at any time."
10- "Miss the opportunity to build a permission relationship directly with the consumer, and your company is likely to become a commodity supplier. If you acknowledge the coming power of the permission holder yet choose to avoid the battle to become one, you can still win. If you start now, you can optimize your company for the role of supplying the permission holder, making yourself more attractive to these gatekeepers and locking in the long-term relationships that can give you insulation moving forward. On the other hand, if you go for the opportunity to deal direct, you'll face the wrath of your existing intermediaries. It'll be expensive to build and maintain a permission base, and risky too. But if you succeed, you will have built an asset that can offset the demands of the gatekeepers. You'll be able to maintain fair pricing and generate better profits."
Top reviews from other countries

From the outset, the author admits that he is revisiting a topic that he first discussed a decade or so earlier, which is fine. The issues lie in the fact that he has not updated the book to deal with marketing in the current climate (or at least at the time of writing the book second time around). The initial part of the book sets the scene and describes the fundamentals of permission marketing. Sadly, the book never really takes off from here. The middle of the book gets muddled and the number of mnemonics and rules on permission marketing start to increase. Before you know it, you're flicking back to earlier chapters to recall what the author is on about.
The books ends completely flatly and I came away wondering what I had learned that I didn't already know. Every chapter seems like a repetition of the previous one, and in the end, I started to lose focus. The blatant lack of up-to-date and non-American examples is the real shocker. Very rarely does the author provide specific examples of how permission marketing has worked/not worked. I think the book would have been stronger and benefited greatly from recent case studies from companies around the world.
As one earlier reviewer has put it, the ideas within the book, whilst initially look sound, are actually outdated; or at least feel outdated.
I would recommend people who are considering this book type in permission marketing into google and see some of the online discussions and posts about the subject. You'll save yourself the price of this book, which fails to live up to expectations.

1. You gain nothing by buying the latest edition of the book - it's exactly the same as the original except for the preface where he explains why he has deliberately not updated the book.
2. You don't need to read this book if you subscribe to his daily blog (which I do). The only thing that the book brings to the table is that it's all in one place, plus he gives examples, except they are all American examples and all 12 years out of date (and remember: this is about the internet).
[By the way, I once emailed Seth Godin asking him for examples to illustrate the points in his blog posts, and he replied saying that there are many examples in his books.]
3. It's possible to download the first few chapters for free from his website and read them as a pdf. Funnily enough, it was reading the first part of the book in this way which persuaded me to buy it.
What the book is about: -
The central idea of the book is very powerful: Most of the marketing and advertising in the 20th century was "interruption marketing" eg newspapers, TV advertising etc. In the modern era there is so much advertising clutter, than most people ignore conventional advertising and instead can be sold to by the marketer building a relationship, over time, with the customer. Powerful stuff - and I recommend all business people to read it.

Moreover, the principles behind what is explained in this book is not new. It might be explained in a different way and put into the internet context but 'Permission Marketing' would be the samoe as infomercials on TV, David Ogilvy's news-looking advertisements or the principles explained in Claude Hopkins' Scientific Advertising 70 years before this book.
I still give it 2 stars because there are still a few good pearls here and there but it has been a disappointment because I've been following Seth Godin's blog for a while and he gives great insights on marketing and business so I expected a timeless classic just like Ogilvy's or Hopkins' books.


Seth talks about 'Permission' marketing, which is the opposite to broadcast. In the broadcast marketing world, we push messages out to people, without asking them if they'd like to see them. This is un-targeted and ineffective. Permission Marketing is about building what Seth calls a Permission Asset. This can be an email list, customer bass, network, following, community, etc, that has given you permission to market to them. This means that when you send out your message, these people are not only likely to buy, but they WANT to buy.
Good thoughts, but if you've read Seth's other books, no need to read this one.