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Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Seth Godin, one of the world's foremost online promoters, offers his best advice for advertising in Permission Marketing. Godin argues that businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional forms of "interruption advertising" in magazines, mailings, or radio and television commercials. He writes that today consumers are bombarded by marketing messages almost everywhere they go. If you want to grab someone's attention, you first need to get his or her permission with some kind of bait--a free sample, a big discount, a contest, an 0800 number, or even just an opinion survey. Once a customer volunteers his or her time, you're on your way to establishing a long-term relationship and making a sale. "By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message," he writes. "It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange."
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, Amazon.com
Customer Reviews:
Seth is always great
It amazes me that people like Dan Kennedy and Seth Godin are in the world and their books have been published for years. Yet businesses still fail because their advice is either not read or read and ignored as nice theory, these guys are not scientists this is not theory, Seth Godin is the freshest thinking business author around. Don't bother getting this book cos you won't follow what is in it anyway. Go find an easy one time fix.
Excellent!
Excellent book and a great investment. It's easy to read and gave me a strong understanding of how Permission Marketing can be used to build a highly profitable and stable business.
Timeless? Maybe not. Contemporary? No doubt.
This book originally written in 1999, 8 years ago, is filled with what are, unfortunately, still original insights given that their uptake in a world filled with traditional marketers still trying to cling to their beloved top-down broadcast model has been slower than expected.
It is the kind of book which as soon as you get the main idea your mind opens up and you start applying it to your business, to your friend's business to any business that is in your mind at the time. And the ideas are good, practicable, ethical and profitable; truly win-win.
In fact reading it you feel that a lot of todays journalism and web 2.0 talk, customer engagement talk are just footnotes to Seth's book. Anybody who didnt know when it was written would think it was this or last year's release.
Makes you really think....
I confess I am a Godin fan and am therefore biased. I think this may be the best of his books to date, and despite the timing of some of the original content it is every bit as relevant today as when it was written.
For anyone who works in B to B sales or professional services, there are some crucial lessons from this book. In particlar it has convinced us that we cannot attract business with an excuse of a website, and that we must rethink every aspects of the sales process to engage with customers. And guess what - it works!
I haven't finished it yet but... 
...it has been a very disappointing purchase so far. The preface announces that, although it was first written in 1999, the author decided not to update it for 2007. At all. There are reasons given but, unfortunately, the result is a very dated read, which doesn't take into account the massive changes that have taken place in the intervening years.
The other major problem, as a reviewer of an earlier edition points out, is repetition. The author says the same thing over and over and over again. Whatever the intention is, the effect is poor. As with many book like this, you feel the idea is really only enogh to justify an aticle in a journal, and not a whole book.
I can't see myself ploughing on until the end.
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