Permission Marketing
Permission Marketing:
Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
By Seth Godin
Simon & Schuster, 1999, 255 pp.
$24
By Eugene E. Kim
The oft-derided field of marketing can actually be a challenging, intellectual, and creative endeavor. And brother, if you believe that, Seth Godin can tell you how to make millions off the Internet. Just buy his book, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers, and you'll be on your way.
Sound like a scam? At least one multibillion dollar company doesn't think so. In October 1998, Yahoo acquired Godin's company, Yoyodyne Entertainment, for $30 million, and made Godin its vice president of direct marketing. Of course, Yahoo's implicit endorsement of Godin's ideas doesn't necessarily mean that his book is any good. Fortunately for the reader, Permission Marketing is a well-written primer on how to use the Internet as a marketing vehicle.
Unlike other books in its genre, Permission Marketing isn't about getting rich quick. In fact, it preaches the exact opposite. Effective marketing, according to Godin, is about developing a long-term relationship with your customers, and as with all types of relationships, it requires a tremendous amount of work. Given this effort, however, the Internet offers tremendous opportunity as a medium for direct marketing.
The most common form of marketing is advertising, which Godin calls "interruption marketing." Advertising is annoying, expensive, and amazingly ineffective.
