Permission Marketing

What's the alternative?

Interruption marketing is giving way to a new model that I call permission marketing. The challenge for companies is to persuade consumers to raise their hands - to volunteer their attention. You tell consumers a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little something about themselves, you tell them a little more, they tell you a little more - and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship. Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

You still have to get people's attention in the first place, of course, and that still costs lots of money. But that's the beginning of the story, not the end. You have to turn attention into permission, permission into learning, and learning into trust. Then you can get consumers to change their behavior.

Does that mean big-budget TV ads go away?

Not at all. Mass-market advertising helps companies talk to strangers. Companies will always need to talk to strangers - to persuade people to pay attention for one brief moment. But after you do the very expensive job of getting people to pay attention, then what? That's where permission marketing comes in. People who've agreed to pay attention don't want you to waste their time with more handheld camera shots or snazzy animation. They want to get to know you. They want you to solve their problems. Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It's not just about entertainment - it's about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

Why would people be willing to give companies 'permission' to talk to them?

Permission marketing is built around rational calculations by both parties. Look at it from the customer's perspective: People have money to spend on products. What people lack are the time to evaluate products and the trust in the companies that make them. The first rule of permission marketing is that it's based on selfishness: Consumers will grant a company permission to communicate only if they know what's in it for them. A company has to reward consumers, explicitly or implicitly, for paying attention to its messages. That's why the Net is such a powerful medium. It changes everything. You can use email to communicate with people frequently, quickly, and unobtrusively - so long as they've given you permission to do that.

Now look at it from the company's perspective: One of the problems with interruption-based marketing is that you have to assume that "no" means "no" - when, in fact, it usually means "maybe." If people see a TV commercial and don't buy your product, or get a piece of direct mail and don't respond, you assume that they've rejected your offer. It's simple economics. If you send 100 people a letter and only 2 of them become customers, the cost of asking the other 98 why they didn't is exactly the same as the cost of contacting them in the first place. So you move on to the next batch of prospects.

What's so magical about the Net is that the cost of talking to the "no's" more than once is zero. With email, frequency is free. You can keep communicating with people, keep teaching them, keep trying to turn them into customers. And it doesn't cost you anything. That's so important. If you want to change behavior, you have to talk to people over and over again.

Is that why Web ads are taking off? Last year, for the first time, advertisers spent more than $1 billion on the Web.

No. Up to now, for most advertisers, the Web has been a phenomenal waste of money. Here are four oxymorons for you: "soft rock," "military intelligence," "taped live," and "Internet advertising." I guarantee you that by the year 2000, Internet banner ads will be gone. They don't work. Why? Because most companies are trying to reach consumers in this new medium by using the same model they used in the old media. Most companies use the Web to talk to strangers. They try to dazzle people with Web sites in the same way they try to dazzle people with TV ads. It's very expensive - and not very effective.

The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you've ever been able to create before. The real killer app for marketers isn't the Web - it's email.

Ordinary people understand this, by the way, which is why they get so nervous about spam. The first time they get an unsolicited email, they say to themselves, "This message didn't cost the sender anything. If I let him get away with this, there will be thousands more just like him. Then my email box won't work, and the Web won't be fun anymore." But if you get permission to use email to deliver marketing messages, and if people agree to pay attention to those messages - well, you've changed the game.