Been a while since I posted a marketing cartoon from the great Tom Fishburne, so when this caught my eye I had no hesitation…
The original post is at…
…and well worth reading.
Tom Fishburne draws attention to these comments from the great Seth Godin…
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You’d interrupt their TV program, and they’d listen to what you had to say. You’d put a billboard on the highway, and they’d look at it. That’s not true anymore. This year, the average consumer will see or hear 1 million marketing messages – that’s almost 3,000 per day. No human being can pay attention to 3,000 messages every day.
“The interruption model is extremely effective when there’s not an overflow of interruptions. If you tap someone on the shoulder at church, you’re going to get that person’s attention. But there’s too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore. So our natural response is to ignore the interruptions….
“Interruption marketing is giving way to a new model that I call permission marketing. The challenge for companies is to persuade consumers to raise their hands – to volunteer their attention. You tell consumers a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little something about themselves, you tell them a little more, they tell you a little more – and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship. Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.”
Seth Godin is credited with coming up with the term “Interruption Marketing” to describe what we might call the conventional “one step” approach to advertising and marketing and wrote the book “Permission Marketing” as something of an antidote to that mainstream approach.
Here’s Seth explaining what he means…
And some more detail…
…and yes, pretty much everything still applies in 2013…
“The resiliency of Permission Marketing”.
Practitioners of direct response marketing can justifiably claim that Godin didn’t really come up with anything new in his book. After all, “Permission Marketing” simply describes the classic direct response marketing model of building a list of interested prospects who have agreed to receive information and advertising from you.
However, the book does provide a useful service in explicitly setting out the approach and explaining the reality of today’s marketplace. It does a great job of explaining why marketers should seek permission from their prospective customers and why that makes good business sense.
(By the way, you can get the first four chapters of the book “Permission Marketing” as a free download here.)
Sadly, all too many people involved in marketing seem completely unaware of this idea. Tom’s cartoon at the head of this post perfectly captures the arrogance, general clue-less nature and sense of entitlement of so many people in mainstream corporate marketing.
Unless you’re in a business where the demand for your product or service is so hot that you have customers lining up then you can’t afford to rely on the old-style approach of interruption marketing.
It’s not that “Permission Marketing” is “nicer” or more ethical (although it is)…
…the brutal reality is that it’s your best chance of success.
One of the reasons for that is that you get the chance to control the marketing environment more and present your message with fewer distractions and competition (not entirely, of course, but to a far greater extent than otherwise).
And note that even when you adopt the Permission Marketing approach, some degree of “interruption marketing” will still be required. After all, you have to attract people’s attention in the first place before they give you permission to continue marketing to them. However, the way you attract attention is, arguably, very different from the usually clumsy approach of the interruption marketer.