Permission marketing essentially means that advertisers only deliver advertisements to a consumer which they are interested in seeing or reading about which is a significant change from what advertising used to be like. In the past, companies would spend millions on advertising campaigns, which could include television ads, billboards, and radio commercials. However, the problem with this kind of advertising is the fact that consumers will be watching and hearing your ads, whether they want to or not and makes it much more likely that they will simply ignore them. As clutter has increased, so has the likelihood of consumers purposely ignoring an advertisements message.
Permission marketing gives the consumer the power of what kind of advertisements they are going to read and watch from a corporation, as well as giving them the power to stop receiving the ads at any time. An example of this is opt-in email which gives the consumer the option of providing their email address to a business or advertiser, in exchange for advertisements that the consumer will find relevant or interesting.
A term that ties in to permission marketing is relationship building, which essentially means giving a company a human touch/face rather than appearing to be a faceless corporation. A prime example of a company who has done tremendously well with permission marketing and relationship building is Google. Seth Godin, who is a world renowned marketer, recently spoke at Google about how well they have built relationships with consumers, which in turn has built up their brand. Seth’s presentation highlighted this by giving examples of Google’s search engine and Yahoo’s search engine from ten years ago. Yahoo’s search engine page was filled to the brim was advertisements, while Google’s contained only their logo and the area for typing in search requests. Google focused more on simply providing a service to the consumer without submitting them to unwanted ads, which paid of for them in spades and has allowed Google to build one of the top brands worldwide, without investing in any unwanted consumer advertising. This generated positive word of mouth among consumers which were more than happy to tell others about Google’s services.
Google didn’t become more popular than Yahoo by having a better search engine; they both did the same task equally well. Google became more popular by relationship building and by not subjecting their potential users to advertisements until after they had inputted their search request. This allowed for the delivery of tailored advertisements to the consumer based on what they had inputted into the search engine. This greatly improved the odds of the consumer being interested in the advertisements and decreased the chance of any negativity being felt for being subjected to unwanted ads.
It’s clear that permission marketing along with relationship building is a positive step for businesses/advertisers and will undoubtedly become a key factor for success for all businesses in the near future.
Posted by brendanrwhargrove 