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Marketing: The Language of Permission

Proliferation of spam, unsolicited commercial e-mail, forced pop-up advertisements, and unrequested newsletters all try the patience of customers.

 

It’s always polite to ask— first.

 

Seth Godin, in his book: Permission Marketing, articulated the need to ask customers for permission when invading their space so one avoids practicing Interruption Marketing.

 

People who get online to shop are already over stimulated with too much information and boredom of empty promises from corporate speak.

 

It’s not enough to use the language of “Permission Marketing” while only paying lip service to it.

 

I spoke this morning to Sandeep Krishnamurthy ,  Assistant Professor in the Business Administration Program at University of Washington, Bothell. He gave me permission to post three paragraphs of “An Analysis of Permission Marketing” http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue2/krishnamurthy.html

 

Mr. Krishnamurthy’s current work looks at how connectivity among consumers promises to change marketing in the future.   

 

Permission marketing (also called invitational marketing) envisions every customer shaping the targeting behavior of marketers (Godin, 1999). Consumers empower a marketer to send them promotional messages in certain interest categories. Typically, this is done by asking the consumer to fill out a survey indicating interests when registering for a service. The marketer then matches advertising messages with the interests of consumers.

This is a new idea. Even though targeting appropriate customers has been recognized early on as a core marketing principle (Smith, 1956), most targeting today can best be described as “targeting on averages.” The advertiser obtains the average profile of the consumer (e.g., a marketer may identify the proportion of a show that meets a certain pre-specified demographic or behavioral category using Simmons data) and chooses, say, a TV show that matches the target consumer profile most accurately¹. This leads to low targeting precision since not all consumers match the profile.

Theoretically, direct marketing holds the promise of improving targeting². One-on-one marketing proposes thinking about a segment of size one (Peppers & Rogers, 1993, Pine, Victor & Boynton, 1993). Given the new capabilities of addressing each individual (Blattberg & Deighton, 1991) the goal is to customize the marketing mix in accordance with the needs of a consumer. Relationship marketing takes a long-term orientation in targeting as opposed to a short-term transactional orientation (Dwyer, Schurr & Oh, 1987; McKenna, 1991, Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). The idea is to understand the lifetime value of the customer and allocate resources in accordance with these values (Day, 2000). The emphasis is on retaining existing customers rather than on obtaining new ones (McGahan & Ghemawat, 1994).

©Copyright 2001 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Maribel Hernandez

www.APMFormulators.com

 

 

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