Permission Marketing

That said, lots of agencies and companies resist such ideas. Permission marketing challenges some of the most cherished assumptions on Madison Avenue. People in this country are born thinking they have two inalienable rights. One is to become President of the United States; the other is to direct a major motion picture. Making a flashy TV ad is a bit like making a movie. That's what an ad agency is good at. That's why people want to work there. But an ad agency isn't equipped to figure out how to persuade customers to grant a company permission to communicate with them. People there don't want to do it.

Permission marketing also changes how companies evaluate their marketing campaigns. In this model, you don't care about cheap impressions. You care about deep relationships. Forget Nielsen ratings, clicks, hits, page views - that's all rubbish. How many consumers have given you permission to talk to them? How far does that permission go? Does every marketing piece you create invite consumers to "raise their hands," to volunteer to hear more?

There's one last barrier to overcome. If you get permission to talk to customers, you'd better have something to say. You need a marketing curriculum. The point of permission marketing is not just to entertain people (although it does need to be entertaining) but also to teach them about your products. And deep down, lots of companies don't really believe they can make a rational case for what they sell. They think they have to rely on style rather than substance.

Is the Net the only place where these ideas can work?

The Net is the ultimate tool for permission marketing. But the idea itself is more about mind-set than about medium. Many of the best-known Web companies don't get this. Yahoo! is a wonderfully successful operation. But every month, 25 million unique users show up at this site, and Yahoo! flushes those people down the toilet. Yahoo! doesn't know who they are, where they live, what they like - it's all anonymous. That strikes me as foolish. Why doesn't Yahoo! get permission to find out who they are, to learn more about their preferences, to lock in an overt learning relationship?

On the other hand, some companies with mundane products understand these ideas very well. I'm a baker. And I never use any flour but King Arthur flour. That's because every three months, the company sends me a catalog loaded with baking tools, recipes, and flours. King Arthur educates me. It talks to me in a language I understand. It has permission to send this catalog to me. It has permission to follow up with other mailings. In return, I learn a lot about its products. So I bake more often, I eat more flour - and the company makes a lot more money off of me than Pillsbury ever will.

Let's go beyond permission marketing and talk about marketing in general: What other changes are on the horizon?

I see three huge shifts. First, we're going to move from a world where companies sell products to one where they sell subscriptions. Do you know how much it costs America Online to attract one new customer? Something like $98. That's how expensive it is now to talk to strangers. But AOL can afford to spend that much because it's selling subscriptions, not a one-time service. So companies will focus more on creating deep relationships with existing customers than on attracting new customers. Marketing will become less visible - a private affair between consumers and the companies they buy from.

The business model I love most is the Book-of-the-Month Club. You give the company permission to make buying choices for you. Why can't lots of other companies operate this way? If I were advising Amazon.com, I would tell [CEO] Jeff Bezos to stop engaging in price wars with Barnes & Noble and to start his own version of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Instead of creating just one club, he could create thousands of clubs, each one tailored to the preferences of certain customers. I love business books. Once a month, in my email box, I should find a message about the four business books that Amazon.com thinks I should read. I'm willing to give Jeff and his people permission to make choices for me. In that sense, I am willing to subscribe to Amazon.com.

At the same time, Jeff's competitors will have to try to convince me to switch to them - as expensive as that may be. And this is the second big shift: Forget interruption marketing as we know it today. Tomorrow I'll have someone or something that negotiates on my behalf. Every time a company wants me to pay attention, it will have to offer some tangible benefits. Essentially, companies will have to pay me to listen to their ads.