Permission Marketing
Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Being an old book, a lot of information is a bit outdated. AOL, AltaVista are gone, Yahoo! was replaced by Google, and we had a dot-com burst since then.
Banners and pop-ups are still with us.
However the basic concept is still valid. I’ve read many reviews where people complain about Godin not writing anything “new”, that the whole permission marketing idea is thousands years old - as he himself points out a few times in the book, it was the norm until about a 100 years ago -, and this is all intuitive, nothing new there.
But if it is intuitive and so well known, why don’t people use it?
The concept is well explained - some would say, repetitive, but those who complain about it forget that he wrote a lot about frequency in his book -, there are 22 short case studies showing different aspects of the concept of permission marketing - including a fledgling amazon.com, just trying to be a successful online bookstore in the shadow of Barnes & Noble.
Yes, it contains a lot of self-evident ideas (short term profit kills off long term profit), but looking around I think self-evident ideas have to be pointed out, because people always forget them, and yes, it can be a bit repetitive at times - how many times did you solve very similar equations in calculus class until you learned how to do it? -, but this is not a novel. It is book that intends to get a message through.
Anyway, I say read it. It won’t hurt. :)
