RSSTHE ABUSE OF PERMISSION MARKETING
January 6, 2008
What is permission marketing?
Seth Godin, hero to many, god to some, has written 7 books about what marketing looks like today and how it will change. Here he is on the cover of his most recent book.
Seth Godin on the cover of his latest book
If you have any interest in marketing, or you have a product to sell, particularly if you use the internet to reach customers, you should listen to this man. An entire industry listens to everything he has to say. He is the savviest, classiest internet marketer of our age.
Watch this video from the TED conference, where Seth discusses the need to make a remarkable product (a ‘purple cow’) for a specialized group of people, instead of average products for the masses. Seth also blogs about marketing, respect, and how ideas spread. You may have read the Empowered Attraction about the website he invented called Squidoo.
He taught us the term ‘permission marketing. It means that companies and advertisers can no longer treat us as a captive audience, glued to our TV and computer screens, and fire ads at us, so-called ‘interruption marketing’. Nowadays, we click to the next screen. We don’t care anymore. We often don’t even believe their hype. We’re more likely to believe our neighbor or someone at work.
Advertisers now have to earn our attention. They do it by requesting our permission to accept their information. Since we all have super-sensitive antennae when we sense we’re being marketed at, it’s not as easy for companies to tell us about their products as it once was. They have had to devise new tactics.
When permission is mistreated
Here’s one that aggravates me. Since I watch no TV, any publicity I’m exposed to comes to me online. I see an offer for a course or an e-book and I sign up, or download the book. Is that the end of it? Oh, no. Now my Inbox is stuffed with propaganda from these people trying to sell more stuff, often not even related to the first item.
I open the e-mail the first few times to see if I care about the content, which turns out to be never. The in-your-face marketing style gets on my nerves. If they were speaking to you, they’d be yelling. They’re often not even saying anything with any substance, just repeating what you’ve heard already.
Example 1 : Justin Michie
Justin Michie
Last August, I downloaded some free chapters of a book entitled Street Smart Internet Marketing by Justin Michie, the idea being that I would eventually buy the book. Once a day for a week, and then several times a month for 4 months, I got a message from this guy pestering me to buy the book.
I got tired of being called Christine by the robot that sends out these messages. I didn’t want to be sold anything else. I finally blocked the sender and deleted the book chapters. I never even read the chapters. All I could think was ‘Get out of my freakin’ Inbox!’.
Sadly, I notice that his messages are sneaking through again, which is wreaking havoc with my (already high) irritability level.
Example 2 : Rich Schefren
Rich Schefren
Rich Schefren is a successful entrepreneur (meaning a guy who is good at starting up businesses and making a lot of money at it) from Australia. He coaches internet marketers in ‘Business Acceleration’ to increase their profits. Now here’s a guy who takes blowing his own horn to a new level.
I recently downloaded his document entitled The Attention Age Doctrine. The content was fairly useful. Obviously, I don’t know as much as the thousands who raved about it (at least Rich keeps telling me they did).
The quality of the content is not the point so the documents are not linked. The fact that I get some sort of e-mail prod from him every other day is the problem. This is permission marketing gone wild. I did not give permission to be badgered by someone who keeps telling me how much money he made in the last 2 weeks.
Is there an Unsubscribe button? No. Even if there was one, I don’t want to have to go search for it.
Undecided : Mark Joyner
Mark Joyner
As you saw in a recent post, I’ve signed up for a Mark’s new blogging course. I don’t know Mark’s work yet, though I do want to read Irresistible Offer. His reputation is very good. I already have warning bells going off because his style looks a little over-the-top . (Update : the “recent post” mentioned has been deleted. 14May08).
To confirm my interest in the blogging course, I had to fill in some information about myself. I was then transported through 2 pages of hype, but I have no idea what the product for sale was. All I remember was advice to chew each mouthful of food 30 times to experience soaring energy levels, and to drink every hour.
I am not making this up, but I am trying it out because I like to try new ideas. So far, I’ve noticed that new tastes come out of food if you chew it long enough, rather like perfume changes its scent after a few hours. My other observation is that the more you drink, the more your body wants to drink. These conclusions certainly have value but I’m just trying to take a blogging course here, Mark.
I do not have a good feeling about this.
Comments
5 Responses to “THE ABUSE OF PERMISSION MARKETING”
Got something to say? I hope so.
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A Greener Tea
Web Maintenence by Rick Beckman
Hi Christine,
Totally valid comments. I’m trying to make our tone far less over the top - and you’re right that the offer for simpleology 103 (the page with the chewing and drinking advice), was totally disjointed from the blogging course sign up.
We basically slapped an upsell in there from one of our other products and it doesn’t make much sense in the context of the blogging course.
If you click “no thanks” at the bottom you can bypass the hype and move on to the meat (which hopefully isn’t a meatball sundae
MJ
Hi, Mark,
I appreciate your very fair-minded reply. I did click No Thanks but didn’t get moved to a better page, or any page. I will try it again. I look forward to your course.
Christine, so much of what you talk about is business to consumer marketing. How do you think these trends will affect business to business marketing?
Great question, Patrick. I had to think about this for awhile, but I don’t think it’s very different. It’s still an example of giving an inch and being taken for a mile. Although the business is selling to one business at a time, instead of 3 million consumers at once, and the purchase process is less spontaneous, they still need to be allowed in the door. And once they’re in…
Am I wrong?