Okay, so Seth in my opinion is the most insightful of the obvious. But keep in mind that the obvious is often overlooked and Seth does a great job of bring it back to the front. Our clients are the most important thing to the business and without them, there is no business, we do and must continue to treat them well. Seth points out it is far better to work with someone that wants to work with you then to just keep interrupting them until they give in. Read the book, it has good insight.

This book changed my career - ever since reading it I've pushed the surf company that I work for to adopt the marketing tactics that are so eloquently laid out in this book. We have just gotten to a level now where we're ready to begin implementing those concepts and a lot of people at work are very excited about the prospect of increasing our sales.

The entire concept of permission marketing seems like a natural way to rise above the noise of traditional interruption marketing techniques and Seth lays it out in a manner that's not only informative, but it's also fun to read.

Another aspect of this book that I like a lot is that it's such a trip down memory lane - Seth goes into the histories of a large number of Web 1.0 Internet startups and talks about their attempts at using Internet marketing. The fact that this guy was able to make so many nuanced observations back in the early years of the World Wide Web is a credit to his foresight and natural marketing capabilities. I highly recommend this book to anyone running (or in my case, helping run) a small business.

Nutshell review - A good read written in a easy to read style. Good insights and ideas. Worth reading.

A good read written in a easy to read style. Good insights and ideas. Worth reading.

Not done reading it yet, however, so far it is just what I expected and great for Realtors!

The permission marketing concepts are essential for all marketers. And of course no one writes a more entertaining read than Godin.

Seth Godin consistently churns out great business publications and "Permission Marketing" is no exception.

In a nutshell, it involves allowing your customer to feel more in control of the sales process. By asking for, and obtaining, permission to contact the customer you are increasing your conversion rate as well as gaining intelligence to deliver relevant offers to your client.

I think I read in a book called, "Life By Design," people have something called a reticular activator, which is basically a hyper sensitivity to the things they are interested in buying.

If somebody is in the early stages of buying a Plasma TV, for example, then they would be more receptive to receiving a newsletter regarding state-of-the-art plasma TVs.

It's a great read, especially in the days of ICANN SPAM rules and regulations.

Having been published in 1999, the book itself is a little dated. Despite that, this is a must read for anyone in the marketing business. The notion of permission marketing, especially in the context of the internet, is tremendously powerful.

I think a few reviewers have referenced it, but I think for companies looking to adopt Seth Godin's approach, the highest hurdle is the investment necessary to lay the groundwork to build the permission model. As Godin discusses at length, the level of interactivity between the consumer and the seller is taken to a whole new level. It requires companies and markeing departments to develop relationships that ultimately leads to sales. The downside is that it can lengthen the sales cycle.

I think it would be interesting to understand how the new technologies of 2006-7 would play into this idea of permission marketing. From You Tube, to having to get by the increasing amount of Spam.... If I read the book accurately, I think the principles would probably remain the same, its the methods of delivery that have changed.

I am in marketing in a B2B technology company. Internally, we discuss how we can better engage clients, prospects and others. Some of Godin's advice has filtered into those discussions. It is clear that to engage our constituencies over the long term, is much more fruitful than some of the traditional marketing methods.

Anyhow, I could go on, but will leave it at that. I do think that it is a must read for anyone in marketing. Grantd, not everything he suggests may be applicable, but I do believe it can help anyone and any marketing group develop new practices in an effort to draw more client in.

I purchased this book from Amazon. I highly recommend.

I have spent more time watching Seth's Blog than reading his books. But recently I bought this book along with purple cows.

I love every aspect of marketing and always appreciate a fresh look at the subject. I like it when people don't follow the norm...and even thought this book is not new to the market I found it refreshing and helping me define exactly what I always knew to be true.

I am about done and looking forward to reading purple cow which I understand to be an expansion of this book.

If you are in this world I would recommend it...

Seth reveals what you must know if you are in business. This is an easy to read and very enlightening book. It will make a difference in the way you think and do business!

Great book!

Bernadette Dimitrov
The HoHoHo Expert

This book is so extremely good, that I would not recommend it.
It would give me too much competition!

The cornerstone idea of 'Permission Marketing' is to turn an advertising monologue into a full dialogue with the customer. Seth Godin argues for establishing one-on-one marketing through successive levels of 'permission' that customer grants to the advertiser. Attention and time are the most scarce resources today; consumers are willing to pay to save time and 'Permission Marketing' aims to capitalize on this trend.

At its core, this book is about converting strangers to friends, and friends into customers. This progression is broken down into implicit 'permission levels' and strategies throughout the book. The ideas proposed have their merit, as both successes of Yoyodine and CyberGold have shown.

Business-to-business marketers have the most to learn from this book - Permission Marketing requires large investments of time and resources into each client (albeit with a lot of automated help) but it is capable of establishing an amazing rapport with the consumer.

The cornerstone idea of 'Permission Marketing' is to turn an advertising monologue into a full dialogue with the customer. Seth Godin argues for establishing one-on-one marketing through successive levels of 'permission' that customer grants to the advertiser. Attention and time are the most scarce resources today; consumers are willing to pay to save time and 'Permission Marketing' aims to capitalize on this trend.

At its core, this book is about converting strangers to friends, and friends into customers. This progression is broken down into implicit 'permission levels' and strategies throughout the book. The ideas proposed have their merit, as both successes of Yoyodine and CyberGold have shown.

Business-to-business marketers have the most to learn from this book - Permission Marketing requires large investments of time and resources into each client (albeit with a lot of automated help) but it is capable of establishing an amazing rapport with the consumer.

It is estimated that every day we are subjected to ~3,000 "interruption"-based marketing messages - on TV, the internet, magazines, radio, billboards, newspapers, etc. [Must be true: I counted 120 display advertisements in a typical morning edition of my local newspaper in the sections I normally peruse - this doesn't include the classified or the additional "advertising package".] Permission marketing seeks to engage customers in a more comfortable, step-wise process and develop a relationship over time. "Opt-In" options for email newsletters are an example of this process.

This book is an excellent source to gain an introduction to permission-based marketing approaches - and to challenge your thinking if you are operating with a traditional "interruption"-based marketing strategy today.

It's easy to discount a book like Permission Marketing as being a book for...well, marketers. However, like all of Godin's books, the underlying message of this book is for anyone in management.

I won't try to summarize the contents of the book -- others have already done that. What I want to point out are what Godin identifies as the biggest stumbling blocks companies face in trying to implement the concepts in this book ('concepts' is not the right word -- 'truths' is a better fit). These stumbling blocks are: organizational problems, greed, and lack of foresight.

People read books like this and generally recognize the values they impart, but taking the nest step and implementing some of the changes necessary in an organization to reach these ideals is sometimes too difficult a task for a single person - and so changes are not implemented. Sometimes bureaucracy limits your company's ability to change, and only crashing and burning opens the door to change (if the company survives). Greed drives other companies to cut short long-term changes over short-term revenue. And as for foresight - if your company is focused on short-term revenue over long-term planning and building discipline around your strategy, your seeds of change will not be able to take root.

Ok, that last part sounded a bit preachy.

Ok, so what is the core of this book? My take is that it's all about loyalty and retention. Permission marketing is nothing more than building honest relationships with your customers, and doing what is necessary to keep them as customers.

As usual, Godin's delivery of these concepts is warm and fresh, and includes many examples from his own professional experience and from the fascinating world of Silicon Valley startups. To get the real value out of this book, however, it all goes back to those corporate stumbling blocks: readers need to recognize the stumbling blocks at their own companies, and take steps to remedy them. Like any 12-step recovery program, the first step is to admit there's a problem. If your company can do that, you're on your way.

Any relationship that lasts probably started out slowly and progressed gradually. Love-at-first-sight is too rare to hope for, even in business.

Godin focuses primarily on email and the web, but it applies to more than that. Direct mail folks to learn a bit from this book.

Get permission to communicate with a customer. Give them value before taking the relationship to the next level. Let them control when the relationship ends, or if it moves forward.

Yes, it is true. You're eyes WILL be opened. Marketing is a fascinating arena in business. Seth provides concepts, stories, and witty humor in a delightful sandwich that is sure to be hungrily devoured by those just getting their feet wet in the marketing adventure or the high and mighty corporations big wigs.

WOW! I read it and I loved it. You'll find some great ideas and a good source of inspiration inside this book.
If you like this book, also try "The Art of the Start" from Guy Kawasaki (the Apple Evangelist).

I think Seth is a genius and I love his witty, relevant books filled with tales of companies we know and concepts and ideas we can relate to.
This is a good read, and well worth it.

If you really want to hear it like it is, with words that flow comfortably and with a real sense of personality - read Seth's books.

[...]

Could have been reduced by half and been just as effective. A simple read. Decent for drilling home the point of permission marketing. This book is best for jump starting your brain in the right direction. More educated readers will be a tad borded. Still a worthwile read for what it is though.

To gain the attention of consumers, marketers must cut through the clutter. According to Seth Godin, author of the book "Permission Marketing", "the average consumer sees about one million marketing messages a year -- about 3,000 per day."

Godin calls the traditional approach to getting consumer attention "Interruption Marketing." The key to each and every ad, contends Godin, is to interrupt what you are doing in order to get you to think of something else. The problem, as Godin sees it, is that "to deal with the clutter and the decreasing effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more!"

According to Godin, "every marketing campaign gets better when an element of permission is added." Interruption Marketing fails because it is unable to get enough attention. Permission Marketing works by taking advantage of this fact.

Consumers are willing to pay handsomely to save time, which is wasted by Interruption Marketing. Permission Marketing offers the consumer an opportunity to volunteer to be marketed to. Permission Marketing, as Godin sees it, "is a lot like dating" and he offers these five steps to "dating" your customer:

FIVE STEPS TO DATING YOUR CUSTOMER
1. Offer an incentive to volunteer
2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about your product or service
3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that permission is maintained
4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission
5. Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer behavior toward profits

These comments first appeared in Pharma Marketing News (see "Out-of-the-box Marketing: Will it Work for Pharma? http://www.pharma-mkting.com/news/pmn27-article02.html).

Seth Godin's 1999 book on permission marketing looked like just another fad "pop" marketing book. But it's stood the test of time. He explains how marketers can adapt to the proliferation of media (specialty magazines, many cable TV channels) and better target their customers.

More importantly, he gives the most prescient analysis of how the Internet can be integrated as part of a firm's promotional mix. His "Five Levels of Permission" develops a continuum for Customer Relationship Management.

This book is an easy read and belongs on the bookshelf of every marketing professional.

Mr. Seth Godin, V.P. Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, tells us how to turn strangers into friends and friends into customer in the excellent book on how to be successful in marketing your products and services. I can only hope that every SPAM marketer, direct mail marketer and fax-blast marketer reads this book. Perhaps if they do, we will all have a lot fewer useless intrusions in our lives.

The bottom line of this very well written and entertaining book is that Godin advises us that "The goal is to avoid surprising the consumers and interacting with them by sending only messages they expect." Those of us who were trained in consultative selling techniques will recognize much of what Godin advocates, but he packages even these "old ideas" in such a way as they are now usable in the new world of internet communications and e-commerce.

Godin gives us the logic behind what most of us have intuitively decided is true - TV advertising doesn't work, direct marketing (as done today) is a waste of time and money, we are squandering our internet marketing opportunity, and we are alienating potential long-term relationships. Godin outlines for tests for permission marketing which, by definition, offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Permission Marketing must: 1. encourage learning relationships with your customers. 2. track the people who have given you permission to communicate with them. 3. provide marketing curriculum to teach people about your products/services. And 4. allow you to deepen your permission to communicate with those people in your permission marketing database.

I "stumbled" in to Search Engine Marketing and now "do it" for a living with car dealerships in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This book, in it's first few pages, helped me. NO I don't know the author :)

David Saunders, Concord, CA

Mr.Godin is an excellent teacher of how to market effectively. Before reading this I thought of marketing probably like most do. I thought to be successful in marketing and advertising, that big was the way to go...big magazine ads, t.v. spots, target a large audience and you're sure to get lots of customers, etc. WRONG!

Mr. Godin hits the bull's-eye on the type of marketing that it takes to acquire and keep customers in your business. It is not mass marketing to anyone and everyone that's going to do it. But rather, Mr. Godin shows you how to set up a specific strategy, a clever method in which to acquire the type of customer you want to your particular business. If you own a sports shop, then your ideal customer wouldn't be a chef or a construction worker who just happened to walk into your store...it would be the die-hard, sports enthusiast that you want to attract. Mr. Godin shows you how to attract your "ideal" customer; He teaches you how to get your ideal customer to come to you.

I didn't fully understand all that "Permission Marketing" was really about until Mr. Godin broke it down and explained it to a tee. If you can get a potential customer to say "yes" to you prior to the sale, your chances of acquiring them as an actual customer dramatically increases. This is what Mr. Godin shows you how to do. He is a wise marketer and you can be too! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

So there are steps in every transaction. The whole point of this book is that you don't create lifelong relationships with strangers. Every sale consists of multiple mini sales.
turn the page
click the link...

You go to amazon
browse through books
see related books
browse through reviews
buy the book

While some of the data relating to the internet is outdated, the fundamental message of the book is still strong. Those who think traditional media outpace targeted ads are dead wrong.

The suggestion that the old is out and the new, permission marketing, is in has been so thoroughly disproved by actual experience that it's reasonable to ask, just why does anyone believe there is anything behind that screen that a little tiny man pretending to be the Wizard?

A few marketers tried to implement these ideas and found they had offended far more people than traditional advertisers ever had. For that reason, this books ranks with books touting Day Trading as the route to riches. No, never: nonsense.

I couldn't even bear to offer this to a used bookstore. Instead, we used it as kindling for a fire. Expensive, but the result was good, and perhaps better than a PrestoLog.

While Godin does a good job retelling an old story about properly targeting, utilizing appropriate messaging and benefiting from modern (post-internet) media, it is not new. Some of his retelling is convoluted in endless metaphores. And, as this book was written before 9/11 and the dot-bomb, much of it is out-of-date and of reduced relevance.

There are more helpful and current books out there about internet and other direct-marketing topics.

While Godin astutely details the need to build relationships with customers, that's been amply covered by other authors. My main beefs with this book are its dismissal of all forms of "traditional advertising" and its specious claim that offering prospects incentives is revolutionary. Wasn't John Caples offering how-to booklets to ad respondents sixty years ago?

However, Godin frames these tried-and-true techniques within the context of the Information Age, offering helpful examples of relationship marketing using e-mail, the Net, databases and the like. That may be particularly useful to business-to-business marketers. But anyone marketing to consumers should beware...brand story, great copywriting and broad visibility do matter still.

Everyday your letterbox is full of leaflets you never read, your banker send you a new financial proposal you already have in your portfolio... All these papers will go directly to the trash can, but interrupt your customer's life: time, privacy and peace of mind. This is the waste created by the "interruption marketing", which is not using correctly customers' databases or is bombarding TV spots you do not watch during film breaks.

Is this time over? Not sure when you see all e-mails or phone calls you receive to promote products of no interest for you. How to get your Attention in the middle of this information overload? Simply by asking your permission.

Seth Godin, who created Internet marketer Yoyodyne and sold it in 1998 to Yahoo, where he is a vice president is explaining to us how to do it in "Permission Marketing". With practical examples he shows us how to start a relationship with a customer by offering added value. Main ideas are around personalization, long-term relationship and truth building. Customer then is expecting information from you focused on his own needs. The challenge is to move from market share to customer share.

But how is this possible? The use of New Information Technologies and Internet allows a one to one communication with a customer with focused information and at a low price. This is really the contribution from "New Economy" and Permission Marketing is giving the keys to understand how these New Information Technologies allow focusing on a customer more and more demanding. The traditional marketing is moving quickly to One to One marketing.

Do not read Permission Marketing if you want to lose your customers to the profit of your competitor knowing how to build long-term relationship with them. If you add One to One from Don & Martha Peppers to your readings, you will be well prepared to succeed in front of the marketing shift arriving with the "New Economy".