A Time for Leadership: Global Perspectives from an Accelerated European Marketplace
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A time for debunking
Unoriginal
Permission marketing or opt-in?
292
Reviews Permission Marketing Seth Godin Simon & Schuster; 1999; hardback; 254pp; £16.99; ISBN 068 4856360 This book, and the concept behind it, need to be debunked before they attain cult status. The author, who is introduced on the book's jacket as vice president, direct marketing, Yahoo!, and founder of Yoyodyne, falls into a common trap: having `leveraged' (his favourite word, not mine) a marketing ploy into a plausible methodology, he feels impelled to ®t a theory around his experience. This causes him great dif®culties, but these are as nothing compared to the dif®culties he causes his readers. Permission marketing (PM), the bedrock and title of this book, is nowhere clearly de®ned except in terms of its opposite: interruption marketing (IM). PM takes place with the consent of the consumer, IM is marketing against the grain. In other words: if your sales message is expected and relevant, you will do better than if it is not. Around this modest and not wholly original insight, Godin has managed to erect a rickety structure of unsupported assertions, invalid conclusions, ambiguities and unrepentant paradoxes. Now and then he cannot help coming up with something useful, but you have to wait until p. 232, 22 pages from the end, before he expresses an original thought. The early chapters deal with ®rst principles. Godin models the advertising scene as being one of intolerable clutter, with more and more voices competing more stridently for a diminishing amount of consumer attention. PM cuts through the clutter. Having obtained permission, you outrank the rabble. And how do you get permission? Here comes the ®rst paradox: you have to join the rabble and compete for attention in order to secure permission. In other words, before you can whisper your blandishments into a willing ear, you have to be successfully strident. The author acknowledges this little dif®culty as reluctantly as does every other advocate of opt-in marketing. There comes a point when he has to concede that PM and IM are not rival methodologies but sequential ones. Before you can market with permission, you have to seek permission. And if you are a stickler for opting-in, you really ought to ask permission to ask permission. It reminds me of the good old days when the then Data Protection Registrar wanted to foist opting-in on a reluctant industry Ð not because he cared about data protection but because he disliked `the interruption' of unsolicited direct mail. Godin is of that ilk. He is squeamish about junk mail, but selectively so. He quite likes his own, and admits that certain products do not lend themselves to PM but have to rely on IM. In a chapter of unconvincing case histories, he gives the example of Evian which is cheap, comes in uniform bottles, and is frequently bought by amateurs of designer water. I could think of better examples to make the point that a well-known brand has a better chance of standing out amid the clutter, being able to draw on its capital of tr
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