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For Marketers, Seth Godin’s mantra of permission marketing is still very much relevant in today’s digital
marketing era. Earlier marketers were following ‘Interruption marketing’ methods of advertising in order
to grab customer’s attention. Such forms of advertising would distract customers away from what they
were doing. Permission marketing was first talked about by Seth Godin in his book «Permission
Marketing Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers» which was published on May 6th
1999. PM is also termed as ‘Social Marketing’. Seth Godin is the founder of Yoyo dyne entertainment
and his experiences as an entrepreneur gave him the idea of Permission marketing. He said that
Permission marketing is a privilege of marketers in delivering anticipated, personal and relevant
messages to people who actually want to get them. He noticed that successful campaigns where those
in which customers permission was sought first. He believed that marketing strategies should be based
on three principles – «anticipated, personal and relevant». These three principals have helped to define
permission marketing-
✓ Anticipated – potential customers would anticipate product/service information from the company.
Permission marketers interact with customers according to the degree of permission, customers give to
them. This is called ‘Permission intensity’, which is the degree of information customers allows
marketers to give them.
Literature review
Neeraj Arora has stated the difference between personalization and customization. The companies start
the personalization process whereas customers start the customization process. The authors have
discussed what are the challenges and the knowledge gap in understanding the choices for firms and
customers. Your Website . In this book, she has devoted a full chapter on permission marketing. She has
considered permission marketing to be an important aspect of internet marketing. As, internet
marketers can get a better response from their customers and there is very less chance of endangering
their customer’s privacy. Through permission marketing, customers will consider the company to be
more credible. The target market also gets willingly involved in the process of marketing. And to get
them willingly involved, companies will have to offer something valuable to their customers. There are
opportunities galore for permission marketing, whenever a customer visits the website. Such as, making
the website attractive, having specific pages, online seminars, new attractions, bookmarking, calendar
reminders, bulletin boards, conducting surveys, giving awards, offline promotions etc. The author has
also given examples of permission marketing whenever website visits are done by customers. Such as
asking customers to join in the mailing list, so that they can get intimations about new offers, contests,
events etc.
There are five levels of Permission marketing which are ranked from lowest to higher levels of
effectiveness.
➢ Situational permission – the prospective customer allows the business to contact him/her by
providing their personal information.
➢ Brand Trust – the prospective customer permits the business to continue fulfilling his/her needs.
➢ Personal Relationship – the prospective customer grants permission to the business because of
his/her personal relationship with someone in the provider organization.
➢ Points Permission – when the customer gets incentives from the business, he agrees to receive goods
and services from them and also shares his personal information with them.
➢ Intravenous permission – by now the customer is now completely dependent on the business as the
supplier now supplies a specific product or service to the customer.
Permission marketing has mainly led to the expansion of social media, as it utilizes the many methods of
permission marketing such as ‘friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘following’.
Flash sales -PM has been there for many years, but only recently it has begun playing a significant role in
Customer Relationship Management. From personalized offerings CRM has changed to timelimited deals
and negotiated member transactions .
This is a specialized form of permission marketing. Once the members register, they give permission to
select offerings and promotions from the marketers.
Opt-in email
Opt-in email is also a prime example of permission marketing, as internet users are well aware and sign
up for to receive information about a product or service.
You Tube
This is a very popular site, used by many users. Basically, it is a video sharing website through which
people can upload, share and view videos.
Conclusion
Today, the world is overloaded with information, with identical marketers selling identical products and
services leading to an overload of advertisements and spam. So, most of the customers welcome
‘permission marketing’ especially ‘e-permission marketing’. Business Week has rightly stated that Seth
Godin is the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information age.